The worst credit is issued at the best of times

I am recently reading Howard Marks’ The Most Important Thing and come across the section describing the credit cycle.

Why the worst credit is issued at the best of times?

Because bad news is scarce and when financial institutions compete for market share by lowering lending standards or required returns.

Typically when there is more capital available to companies or individuals, you have lower return on capital when they invest.

Then when something bad happens, the cost of capital can shoot up and become higher than the return of capital generated by the previous projects.

These projects can’t sustain in the new environment and thus are destroying capital.

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This is also true in valuation and VC returns.

The worst VC deals are made during the best of times!

Remember the 2020-21 era? Not hard to destroy some capital if you invest in a SaaS company with 40x P/S during that time.

Read more on SaaS P/S here – The previous 40x P/S sector was SaaS