Ruben Shafir: Underwriting Unit Economics in a Shifting Credit Market

In this episode of the Credit Bubble, I sit down with Ruben Shafir, founder of Luna Park Capital. His path runs from Brooklyn to Wharton at 16, Lehman Brothers at 18, and ultimately to founding his own credit platform. We get into how an early sense of capital as a scarce resource wired him as a deep-value investor, and how running workouts at Lone Star in London through the 2008 crisis taught him the difference between cyclical and permanent impairment. We dig into his time building the European venture debt book at Arena, why the market spent years underwriting sponsors rather than businesses, and how rising rates finally exposed the misalignment. Ruben also walks us through the thesis behind Luna Park Capital: credit-oriented investments into capital-constrained late-stage growth companies, where the dispersion between debt and equity pricing is the opportunity.