What’s Going on in Private Credit?

Citations · 6

• “In the last 15 years, something like $2 trillion of direct loans has been made. (The whole private credit sector was only about $150 billion 20 years ago.)”

  p#47 · confidence 95%

• “Hundreds of investment firms offered their services in direct lending, the vast majority of which entered the private credit market after the end of the Global Financial Crisis, meaning they'd never been tested in rough times.”

  p#44 · confidence 95%

• “MSCI estimates that between 2022 and Q3 2025, an index of U.S. private equity funds saw annualized returns of 5.8%, compared to 11.6% for the S&P 500.”

  p#125 · confidence 95%

• “direct lending is only around 20% of Oaktree's investments in performing credit and less than 15% of our overall assets under management.”

  p#105 · confidence 95%

• “in November 2025, Anthropic released a powerful new model for coding, followed in late January by the release of 11 "plug-ins" to automate tasks in a number of fields. It seems a cognitive tipping point was reached in the first days of February.”

  p#66 · confidence 92%

• “the representation of software debt in the U.S. sub-investment grade credit markets to roughly the following proportions: High yield bonds 4-5%, Broadly syndicated loans 10-15%, Direct lending 20-30%”

  p#57 · confidence 95%