Finance & economics | Buttonwood

Has private credit’s golden age already ended?

A more competitive market is a less profitable one

Illustration of a man's profile wearing a laurel wreath with money instead of leaves, the money is falling off. Drawn in the style of greek pottery
Illustration: Satoshi Kambayashi

The HISTORY of leveraged finance—the business of lending to risky, indebted companies—is best told in three acts. High-yield (or “junk”) bonds were the subject of the first. That ended in 1990 when Michael Milken, the godfather of this sort of debt, was sent to prison for fraud. In the second act, the extraordinary growth of private equity was financed by both junk bonds and leveraged loans, which require companies to pay a floating rate of interest rather than the fixed coupons on most bonds. Private-credit investors are now supplying the third wave of money. Since 2020 such firms, which often also run private-equity funds, have raised more than $1trn. When interest rates rose in 2022 and banks stopped underwriting new risky loans, private credit became the only game in town. Wall Street chattered that its “golden age” had begun.

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This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “The iron price”

From the June 15th 2024 edition

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