Ackman：将霍氏地产转为资产管理模式，释放20-30亿美元资本

So you just had your Howard Hughes investment. And again, the biggest acquisition you did for this was very recently closing this insurer vantage. And with that you get some more firepower behind you to invest. What is the plan with that money? What are you looking at? Sure. So if you if you follow Mr. Buffett over 60 years, incredible. 61 years, maybe incredible career. And you look at what how did he creates value Berkshire Hathaway over time.

He did I would say two principal things. Let me move three. Um, first he has he wound down the textile operation. He took the capital and bought an insurance company, and then he managed the assets of that insurance company differently from a typical insurer. He took the float and invested in short term treasuries. So the policyholders knew that there was money set aside to pay claims. And then he took the surplus with the insurer and invested in common stocks.

And he did a good job managing that portfolio. And insurance is a very cash flow, generative business because you write premiums, you collect money upfront and you pay it out in the future. And as a result, uh, Berkshire was able to grow a very rapid rate, compounding, uh, the insurance company's assets, earning a high return on capital without having to issue stock. And so Berkshire had a million shares outstanding for most of its life.

Uh, until, uh, I guess the Gen re acquisition. So the combination of growing a very valuable business inside a company and not issuing stock as you grow led to enormous pressure, sure value being created. Basically, we're taking a page from Mr. Buffett. Vantage is a specialty insurer and reinsurer. Uh, we closed in June. Uh, in July, we announced that Mark Rennison, the former CEO of Arch Capital Group, one of the best performing insurance companies over the last 25 years.

Uh, he was the CEO for the last eight years. He was that arch really from inception. Uh, is became executive chair advantage. Uh, Mark recruited David Ginsburg, former president, his protege, uh, at Arch capital Group. Uh, Lucy Fato, former vice chair, general counsel of AIG. And we brought an enormous horsepower to what was already a very good insurance company platform, already had a very good team and were taking the.

We immediately sold the fixed income assets, which has become increasingly important because of moving rates. Yes, we invested the money in short term treasuries. Uh, but 65% or so, when 35% of the assets we invested in a common stock portfolio that we manage. So our goal is to build a high ROE, uh, specialty insurance company led by a superb team with us managing the assets and grow Howard Hughes and increase the intrinsic value of the company.

Just on that note, on selling longer dated treasuries, which obviously add to your point, was a very prescient move concerning what rates are doing. Is this an environment where generally you'd be avoiding duration, be it Howard Hughes or any of the other investments that you look at? I know equity majority investor, but is that bond market untouchable right now? So I'm not really a fixed income investor. I never found that risk reward of owning a longer term fixed income instrument.

Interesting. Just not my I sort of like risk free or high return. I don't like stuff on the equity portion then advantage. How far can you push this? How much can you invest into equities. So we're going to run a relatively low leverage insurer. Most insurance companies you know, write a uh amount of premium equal to uh, the, you know, the the equity, the capital of the insurer will write less than that. Um, and we'll also most insurers invest, you know, something like two and a half times, uh, their equity in assets.

And we'll invest less than that. So we'll have much less leverage on both sides. We'll take zero risk for the bulk of the, uh, insurance company assets, as I mentioned, short term treasuries. That frees us up the flexibility under the capital rules to have something in order of 40 to 50% of the of the, uh, uh, if I'm approaching 40% of the asset, 40 or 45% of the assets in common stocks and the vantage acquisition, any other transforms, transformational acquisitions you're looking at or vantage has done, and you can set that aside for now.

I would say it's certainly not done. It's at the very beginning. And Mark's going to do his thing right. But we announced something else of significance today. I tweeted about it and we talked about it today, which is Howard Hughes, uh, has built an extraordinary team as an amazing collection of assets in markets where people want to live, and the business is selling lots to homebuilders and these small what we call NPCs, these small cities that we that we manage, we own all the commercial real estate, uh, the land, uh, etc. it's a business we financed entirely with our own equity for the last 15 years.

Uh, we're going to a model. We're going to bring in third party investors, uh, you know, think Brookfield, you know, think Blackstone. Right. Uh, the typical real estate investor today puts up very little of their own money. They charge fees and promotes, uh, we're going to have a lot of skin in the game today. We have 100% of the equity. We're going to begin a process, uh, immediately, uh, to bring in partners to reduce our equity commitment to our real estate by as much as 80%, uh, and then turn Howard Hughes into more of a asset real estate asset management business with a lot of skin in the game, but one that can earn a much higher return when you take out 80% of the equity, bring in third party capital you're in promotes.

That will enable us to take, we think, 2 or $3 billion of equity over the next, you know, sometime by the end of next year, hopefully capital that we can now redeploy into, uh, advantage. And, you know, when you get a very talented team, you want to put more capital behind them. And that's what we're doing with Mark. What the real estate subsidiary benefits now can earn much higher returns because it's leveraging third party capital that's going to enable it to accelerate some of the development assets that, you know, in the context of the cost of public company capital were difficult to achieve, are difficult to justify, now become much more attractive.

So while you've been working on this, you also launched your IPO both at Pershing Square and Pershing Square, USA. When it comes to the latter one, the closed and fund, you raise $5 billion and it's since fallen 25%. It also trades at a discount of $0.25 to every dollar, something that you or both of those are the same thing. Yes. For the the and you're clarifying my clarification. So I'm pleased for that. But you've called this ridiculous.

This, this, this discount that it's trading at. Bill, what do you do to turn that around? Uh, or among other things, we go on Bloomberg TV and we talk about it. All right. This is the moment. So talk about it. What's gone wrong? Okay, so we did an interesting IPO in that we did two lists. We did a listing and an IPO. We took public a closed and fun but a very different closed and fun. So typical closed and fun frankly doesn't have a very good track record.

Uh, and uh, the it's not really a financial it's a financial product that's sold generally to a financial advisor. The client is usually not particularly involved in this case. For the majority of the investors, the substantial majority, the investors, they made an investment, this entity to invest with Pershing Square historically to invest with Pershing Square as a U.S. citizen. Got to invest with us privately in a fund where we charge a 1.5% management fee and a 20% incentive fee, and you had to lock up your money for, you know, over a longer period of time.

This is a liquid public vehicle that doesn't charge incentive fee. Yeah, it's the lowest cost hedge fund of the world. It's got a 19% compounded, you know, nearly 23 year, uh, track record. The track record of the strategy is the