Josh Birnbaum is an American businessman. He is the co-founder and Chief Investment Officer of Tilden Park Capital Management and a former managing director at

Goldman Sachs Goldman Sachs () is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company. Founded in 1869, Goldman Sachs is headquartered at 200 West Street in Lower Manhattan, with regional headquarters in London, Warsaw, Bangalore, H ...

Early life and education

Raised for a short time in Paris, France, Birnbaum's family moved to

Oakland, California Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast of the United States, West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third ...

, where he attended

Head-Royce School Head-Royce School (Head-Royce or HRS) is a private co-educational college-preparatory K-12 school in Oakland, California. The forerunner of Head-Royce was the Anna Head School for Girls in Berkeley, founded in 1887. Relocated to its current site ...

private school, graduating in 1990. After high school, Birnbaum attended the

Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania ( ; also known as Wharton Business School, the Wharton School, Penn Wharton, and Wharton) is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, a Private university, private Ivy League rese ...

, where he earned a degree in finance.

Career

Birnbaum interned for Goldman Sachs in the summer of 1992 as a collateral mortgage obligations analyst. After graduating Wharton he remained with the firm, eventually leading Goldman's

structured product A structured product, also known as a market-linked investment, is a pre-packaged structured finance investment strategy based on a single Security (finance), security, a basket of securities, Option (finance), options, Index (economics), indices, ...

s group. In 2007, Birnbaum had reportedly generated $3.7 billion for the bank by

short-selling In finance, being short in an asset means investing in such a way that the investor will profit if the value of the asset falls. This is the opposite of a more conventional "long" position, where the investor will profit if the value of the ...

the

subprime mortgage In finance, subprime lending (also referred to as near-prime, subpar, non-prime, and second-chance lending) is the provision of loans to people in the United States who may have difficulty maintaining the repayment schedule. Historically, subpri ...

market, for which he was given a bonus of $10 million. In 2010, Birnbaum testified before the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations regarding the firm’s role in the

subprime mortgage crisis The United States subprime mortgage crisis was a multinational financial crisis that occurred between 2007 and 2010 that contributed to the Financial crisis of 2007–2008, 2007–2008 global financial crisis. It was triggered by a large decline ...

. After 14 years of working for Goldman, Birnbaum left in 2008 to form Tilden Park Capital Management, named after

Tilden Regional Park Charles Lee Tilden Regional Park, also known as Tilden Park or Tilden, [], is a regional park in the East Bay (San Francisco Bay Area), East Bay, part of the San Francisco Bay Area in California. It is between the Berkeley Hills and San Pablo R ...

near where he had grown up in Oakland, California. Co-founded with former Goldman colleague Jeremy Primer and fellow University of Pennsylvania alum Sam Alcoff, the firm started investing in February 2010 with a $25 million managed account.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Birnbaum, Josh Living people Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania alumni Chief investment officers Goldman Sachs people Subprime mortgage crisis Year of birth missing (living people)