Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479]
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Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Some. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit pspsum.vc.
My guest today is Vlad Barbolat, the chief investment officer of Liberty Mutual Investments, the $120,000,000,000 investment platform that sits within one of the largest insurance companies in the world. Vlad grew up in Soviet Moldova, came to America in 1990, and built a career that eventually led him to one of the most distinctive capital allocator seats anywhere in finance. Today, we talk about how the mutual insurance structure creates a unique investment platform, what Liberty looks for in a new deal or partner, and what it means to build a career and a life in a country that gave you opp
The thing is the balance sheet of one of the largest insurance companies in the world, one of the most diversified insurance companies in the world, Liberty Mutual Group, which has two primary insurance businesses that ultimately feed the investment platform. First is the one that probably most are familiar with, the Liberty Jingle, which is our personal lines business, one of the largest in The US, that of course is the home and auto component of our business. And then there is the business that is much more global in nature, and really serves a sophisticated set of companies, brokers, partne
Maybe explain one level more why the insurance idea is so powerful. Very famously, Buffett built a big chunk of Berkshire's success on this idea that if you have a sort of insurance part of your business, you control this float, and that that's this magic access to capital, and creates this permanence that allows you to do things others can't do. Maybe build that bridge between sort of the Buffett way of thinking and how it feels to actually operate this thing.
What really is interesting to me is how insurance is one of these industries that serves so many different purposes, and the way I like to think about it is that one side of our business and one side of our balance sheet is all about protecting, whether it's an individual, whether it's a business, and syndicating that risk, allowing risk to be taken by the people in the world. And so we have a very appropriate way we think about that at Liberty. We say we want people and businesses to embrace today and confidently pursue tomorrow. That's what the insurance part of our business does. When we se
So coming back to this unique combo, so you you were providing the value through insurance, hedging people's risk, one way to think about it, that creates this pool of capital, a 120,000,000,000 that you can then, at least some portion of it will get into that, invest and supp
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