Yes. That's a terrific question.
One of the things I did when I sat in my seat as CEO four years ago was to focus on our private market valuations. We had pretty good private market valuations, private asset evaluations, but we wanted to make sure that they were world-class. When my chief financial and risk officer, Neil Beaumont, arrived, we sat down shortly after he was hired and said, “Okay, we're going to make this approach really world-class.”
We said that we were going to make sure that we have independent teams of valuers who are incredibly rigorous, and they have the call, they have the pen—the investment teams don't have the call—and also that we have an incredibly rigorous and much more regular approach to private asset valuations. I didn't know that something dramatic would happen on my watch, but both of us looked at each other and thought, “The chances are, with this expanding recovery, it probably will happen on our watch.” We wanted to be prepared for it.
In fact, again, it's super lucky. If you go to our website, you'll see that on January 24, Neil Beaumont put up an interactive video showing how we do our private asset valuations and how had we improved and that this was the approach. We didn't know that we were about to hit a massive market event and would be able to test that process, but we're super glad that we did and super glad that we put it out for the public to understand how we were doing that approach.
As we came in through this and looked at it year-round, we took a really hard look and took some really tough marks on the valuation of our private assets, so they really do represent the value of those assets at that point in the market. They're a true representation of the value of those assets, whether it's private equity assets, real estate assets or infrastructure assets. There were some tough conversations, obviously, with investment teams that believed in the long-term value of these assets, but we wanted to make sure that they were truly right.
Also, then, we have an independent audit approach that comes in, makes sure and goes through a very large number of those assets again. They do their work to make sure that those really are robust valuations. We were quite satisfied with the fact that we had been.... My chief financial risk officer won't like me saying that we were “conservative” on it, but I think he would say we got the right valuations—