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 The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company. Founded in 1869, Goldman Sachs is headquartered in Lower Manhattan in New York City, with regional headquarters in many internationa ...

Early life and education

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

Oakland, California Oakland is a city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It is the county seat and most populous city in Alameda County, California, Alameda County, with a population of 440,646 in 2020. A major We ...

, 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 si ...

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

Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania The Wharton School ( ) is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, a private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia. Established in 1881 through a donation from Joseph Wharton, a co-founder of Bethlehem Steel, the Wharton ...

, 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, a basket of securities, options, indices, commodities, debt issuance or foreign currencies, an ...

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

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 American subprime mortgage crisis was a multinational financial crisis that occurred between 2007 and 2010, contributing to the 2008 financial crisis. It led to a severe economic recession, with millions becoming unemployed and many busines ...

. 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 $25 million (~$ in ) managed account.

References

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