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Private Credit 

David Brooke

Have some sympathy for asset managers. Their private credit arms are required to compete for the best assets; their private equity arms are under pressure to sell their assets to fund payouts to LPs when buyers want bargain prices.

Today is all about how the giants of the financial industry find creative ways to circumvent these pressures.

Take PEI Media (incidentally my former employer). Last month, 9fin reported that Bridgepoint (a manager of private equity and credit funds) sold the financial media publication for close to $1bn dollars to…Bridgepoint — moving the asset from its midcap investment strategy to its large cap investment strategy. Different teams, but both were evidently fond of the asset.

This afternoon, 9fin reported that the financiers of the latest deal were Sixth Street and incumbent lender CVC Credit — another institution fond of the asset. The funding comes from a $400m debt package. 

But PEI follows a similar pattern as the RBMedia transaction, which is an audiobook publisher, acquired earlier this year by Francisco Partners and HIG Capital. Previous owner KKR is now backing it through its private credit arm, which funded the new buyout. Again, KKR likes RBMedia.

In these tough times it may make sense for institutions to keep assets they like. In the face of the aforementioned pressure to make distributions, their sprawling structures mean they can transfer good assets between funds to keep them in house. 

You may be familiar with the $1.6trn figure that is the global size of the private credit market regularly bandied about (Barclays not so long ago broke down the sum documented here).

As we noted in that article, it’s a “tidy sum”. But no matter the size, the market continues to grow. The latest Preqin figures show just nigh of $200bn was raised globally across the private credit market last year.

Strategies that target the senior end of the capital structure totaled $54.13bn — more than a quarter of the global amount. Mezzanine strategies pulled in an impressive $39.29bn — unsurprising when junior debt has been highly attractive.

So onward and upward for private credit. Denominator effect be damned. Soon enough we’ll be quoting $1.7trn, $1.8trn, $1.9trn, so on and so forth.

Have we avoided a recession? That might be the quite extraordinary conclusion to a year of speculating how severe or soft the downturn would be. Those were the two options it seemed when inflation in the US economy spiked. But as the wisdom goes, you tend not to be able to reduce inflation without triggering a recession. In 2024, central banks may in fact achieve the impossible.

The ‘higher for longer’ thesis is taking a knocking with the Fed signaling it may cut rates as many as three times next year. And does this mean the ‘golden age’ of private credit is already over after 18 months of both bluster and mockery?

Arguably the golden age for private credit has gone on for longer than the last two years — since the global financial crisis in fact. The market flourished in the ZIRP era and it has continued to take market share from the banks in a period of higher interest rates. 

Indeed, there has been stress in portfolios of private credit firms, but seemingly they’ve weathered the storm (like they did during Covid). With higher interest rates a burden for borrowers, lenders got creative by offering PIKs. It’s something the banks cannot do.

So where does the market go from here? Ultimately, it’s impossible to tell. Some call it a bubble, while some practitioners see it as a positive permanent structural development in the leveraged finance markets. Even if private credit is the bubble that pops, there won’t be the same type of existential crisis to the global financial system as when Lehman et al collapsed — though watch out for your 401k.

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