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Each year, we take time to reflect on the economic and capital market conditions that impact Hudson Hill’s portfolio companies. This year’s review represented an interesting moment in time, as our Leadership Summit coincided with the start of a new administration in the United States, which will lead to significantly altered conditions in each of the markets we reviewed. Nonetheless, a grounding in the current macro environment provides helpful framing for business decisions made every day in our companies.

Over the last fifteen years, zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) altered capital markets by impacting discount rates, which created a competitive advantage for private equity firms relative to other buyers of assets. This competitive advantage derived from the fundamentals of asset pricing — discounted cash flows (DCF) — which discounts free cash flows by a weighted average cost of capital (discount rate).

In 2022, Edward Chancellor published a book called The Price of Time, which chronicles the historical relationship of economic activity with interest rates. The conclusion of the book is that low interest rates reduce labor and capital productivity by reducing the threshold for efficiency in the deployment of capital. Chancellor observes that long periods of economic malaise tend to follow periods of capital excess.

Hudson Hill Capital, a private investment firm founded by Eric Rosen, today announced a significant majority investment in MarketTime, a SaaS platform that offers a comprehensive set of features to facilitate wholesale retail commerce between brands, manufacturer representatives, agents and retailers.

Over the past fifteen years, the private equity industry relied on M&A as a key pillar in value creation, thereby increasing its reliance on capital markets to finance returns. Over the next decade, higher interest rates will constrain access to capital for private equity owned businesses, lowering the attractiveness of debt funded M&A to generate equity returns.