William Raymond Katz - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.
Analyst · Citigroup. Your line is open
Okay. Thanks. Just actually a couple of follow-ups, if I can do so. What were your thoughts as you thought about different strategies, obviously you need to go down this route, but instead of shifting the payout policy of doing more of a levered recapitalization and maybe putting some debt up against the balance sheet and buying in stock without really adjusting the variable, what were some of the mechanics behind that? And perhaps related to that is, what's the multiple you're assuming on the fee paying AUM component of your business when you went through this corporate finance discussion?
Scott C. Nuttall - Member & Head of Global Capital and Asset Management Group, KKR & Co. LP: Hey, Bill, this is Scott. I'll take that. Look, I think from – the first question, the leverage recap comment, look, I think we've run the firm historically with modest net leverage to zero net leverage. Our perspective is that we have a significant amount of upside through the companies that we're invested in, many of which are levered themselves as you know. And so, we didn't think it was appropriate to add a significant amount of leverage to the corporation at the risk. Actually, one of the slides in the deck we talk about is that simultaneous equation. We don't want to add a lot of franchise risk by adding a lot of leverage at the HoldCo. So, that's the main reason that we decided leveraged recap wasn't something that was attractive. In terms of the multiple on our fee businesses, I think you probably know the answer to that as best we do. I think our observation is that if you look at how we make money, certainly, we have a good chunk of our revenues come from fees, but we have a more meaningful component that comes from carry and from our balance sheet. And so, every time we go through our analysis, it's all connected. Investment return is the most important thing we can focus on and generate. If we generate investment returns, we'll have more carry, we'll have more balance sheet income. It'll be easier to raise larger pools of capital from third-parties and we'll therefore have more fees. So we're focused on what we can control, which is making good investments and monitoring them and making sure that we create real value. And so, that's how we thought about it. And all of that accrues to the positive for all of us as shareholders. So we think of it as, frankly, a more fungible set of revenues where all things benefit from generating good investment returns.