Arc of the Covenant Podcast: the first three episodes are live

The Arc of the Covenant podcast is now live, and the first three episodes are out on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

The show follows one thread - the promise between borrowers and lenders, and what's become of it. Each conversation looks at that promise from a different perspective, because the same set of documents reads differently depending on where you are when you open it.

Episode 1, "A private cram down," is with Shan Qureshi, legal analyst at Octus, who reviews the year liability management stopped being a tactical outlier and became a core restructuring tool. We work through the deals that made it real. Selecta was the turning point, where a sequence of innocuous steps combined into what Shan calls a private cram down. Hunkemoller was the first serious test of creditor-on-creditor violence in Europe, with governing law at its center. The Altice drop-downs were run a second time with no call and no warning. We also trace the cooperation agreement's route from shield to sword to antitrust defendant, and cover Part 26A fatigue, forum shopping, and where the coming year goes.

Episode 2, "The blocker wasn't the numbers," is a career conversation with Labib Chowdhury, a director in Rabobank's leveraged finance team and Fox Legal Training's first ever individual client. We start at the beginning - how he came to credit, and the moment on his first live deal when he realized the blocker wasn't the numbers. Legal fluency changed what he could contribute, down to reading a sponsor's add-back request for what it actually was. It's practical throughout, built around the habits that worked: the covenant notebook, translating clauses into the model line they influence, and sitting in on legal calls to pick up the language.

Episode 3, "GPs know what you want to hear," moves to the allocator's seat. Susan Baker, a senior portfolio manager at the Arizona Public Safety Personnel Retirement System, runs a 20 percent target allocation to private credit, and she walks through the machinery behind covenant discipline from the LP side - a metrics template that collects more than forty data points on every deal, case studies drawn from the underperformers rather than the pitch deck, and deal team attribution to see who actually did what. As she puts it, GPs know what you want to hear, while the data shows what they did. We also get into board trust, her super cynical hat, and why she blocks Fridays for learning.

That's the through-line across all three - the same documents, read from wherever you happen to sit. New episodes are out every other week.

Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. 

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033N0naHUQlOOvDlrcMWQ7. Apple link coming soon!