Andrews leaves PIMCO to start own venture

David Andrews has resigned from investment firm Pimco to start his own venture.
“There is a huge search for yield in every fixed income asset class,” says Andrews. “When you look around your options, particularly in corporate bonds, the risks are dramatically changing today. We are seeing a concerted and steady real energy of corporate balance sheets, which is generally not a positive for bond holders. We are seeing a lot of stock repurchases and increasing dividends, a lot of calls on capital and in some cases companies are borrowing to support their shareholder-friendly activities. So there is a lot of risk in the straight, unsecured corporate lending space. The aircraft market is a relatively safer port. Aircraft are also hard assets in a world where central banks globally are devaluing currencies, flooding the markets with liquidity, trying to push inflation up. Therefore investing is hard, real assets is a real positive. For all those reasons, it is a good time to step out and try to do something on my won. I have been with Pimco for ten years and have enjoyed my time there enormously but for me it was time to move on.”
The credit analyst, who has been with Pimco for ten years, has been a pivotal investor in countless aviation financings and his resignation has come as a shock to many in the industry.
Mark Lapidus, Managing Director at Doric, says: “David’s insightful, methodical intellect, coupled with old style fieldwork, will be much missed, as will be his penetrating, Helen Thomas press-core style questions at conferences, and I hope that in his new travails we cross path again soon.”
Although Andrews is reluctant to speak further about his plans for the future, he told Airline Economics that “wheels are definitely in motion”.
Prior to joining PIMCO, Andrews was a Director in Investment Grade Fixed Income Research at UBS Warburg/Paine Webber, where he covered US autos, transportation, aerospace/defense and capital goods. Prior to joining UBS Warburg he spent six years at Moody's and was responsible for global ratings of all automobile companies. Andrews has twenty-two years of investment experience, holds a bachelor's degree from Kenyon College and an MBA from the Lublin School of Business at Pace University.