Large direct lending portfolios carry just 2 to 3% exposure to infrastructure deals, leaving allocators with heavy concentration in software and healthcare at the exact moment those sectors face AI disruption risk and macro uncertainty.

What's New Cliffwater's recent paper "The Arithmetic of Direct Lending" makes the case that private credit's return profile is governed by a small set of observable, measurable inputs rather than the complexity often attributed to it. Using 20+ years of CDLI data, the paper decomposes returns into income, credit gains/losses, and fees/leverage, and shows that even under extreme stress scenarios the asset class produces outcomes within a surprisingly narrow and predictable ran

Private credit's financing role remains intact despite BDC noise. GS sees expansion ahead as jumbo deals and market fluidity grow.

What's New Europe's middle market is structurally cheaper, deeper, and harder for outsiders to crack than the US — and Bridgepoint is betting its next decade of growth on that gap. On the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast, Partner and CIO Xavier Robert detailed how the firm is positioning itself as the global champion of middle market investing. With roughly $100 billion in AUM, Bridgepoint has expanded beyond private equity into US power infrastructure (via the ECP acquisition), s

A recent analysis from PRISM scored the ten largest BDC software lenders using its Velcro Credit Quality framework and found a 20 point gap between the strongest and weakest portfolios.

PRISM's Velcro Score analysis reveals that the private credit market has inverted the risk premium on software lending.

$467B in software principal matures by 2032. Most was underwritten without a framework to tell good software from bad.

What's New A recent analysis from PRISM  reveals that the private credit market holds $124.2 billion in software exposure across 131 funds and 1,305 companies, yet prices structurally different risk profiles as if they were identical assets. The report introduces the Velcro Score, a three axis taxonomy that classifies software borrowers by how difficult they are for customers to replace in a downturn, exposing an inverted risk premium where the riskiest software credits actu

What's New Kieran Goodwin, Partner at Saba Capital, delivered the most detailed reflexivity framework for private credit stress in a conversation with Ted Seides on Capital Allocators , arguing that dividend cuts across major non traded BDCs have triggered a behavioral feedback loop in the retail wealth channel that the industry's liquidity structures were never designed to absorb. Goodwin, a three decade credit veteran across King Street, Panning Capital, and now Saba, conte

What's New Leyla Kunimoto, founder of Accredited Investor Insights, delivered the most granular breakdown of the mechanics now driving private credit redemption caps in a conversation with Jack Farley on Monetary Matters , arguing that the semi-liquid fund structures that absorbed $450 billion in capital over the last several years were built exclusively for inflows and have never been tested in a sustained outflow environment. Kunimoto, a retail investor and independent anal

What's New Nicholas Brooks, Head of Economic and Investment Research at ICG, laid out a structurally optimistic framework for private markets in a conversation on S&P Global's Private Markets 360 , arguing that the balance sheets of corporates, households, and systemically important banks are in strong enough shape to contain risks at the idiosyncratic level rather than the systemic level. Brooks, who oversees ICG's proprietary database tracking fundamentals across nearly 500

What's New David Gross, Managing Partner of Bain Capital, pushed back against the prevailing narrative that private credit and software lending represent systemic risk in a conversation with Andy Serwer at Barron's , arguing that the market has conflated a diverse set of software businesses and credit structures into a single bear thesis that does not reflect the underlying fundamentals. Gross, who took over as sole leader of Bain Capital earlier this year, contends that the

In a revealing Goldman Sachs Exchanges episode, equity research analyst Alex Blostein and Vivek Bantwal, global co head of Private Credit in Goldman Sachs Asset Management, push back on the doom narrative engulfing private credit. Their message is nuanced but clear: the asset class faces legitimate headwinds from retail redemptions and software exposure, but the systemic risk fears dominating headlines are disconnected from the actual data.

What's New In a candid Bloomberg TV appearance , Oaktree Capital co CEO Armen Panossian delivers what may be the sharpest framing yet of the private credit selloff: this is not a private credit problem, it is a vintage problem. With Blue Owl reporting 41% redemption requests on one of its BDCs and publicly traded BDCs trading at steep discounts, Panossian argues the market is painting the entire asset class with one brush when the real issue is concentrated in pre 2022 vintag

What's New In a wide-ranging episode of Alt Goes Mainstream , David Nowak, President of Brookfield's Private Equity Group, unpacks how one of the world's largest asset managers has built a private equity business defined not by financial engineering but by operational grit, collective humility, and a relentless owner-operator mindset. The conversation arrives at a pivotal moment for the industry: as rate normalization exposes the limits of leverage-driven returns, Brookfield'

KKR Co-CEO Scott Nuttall used his closing keynote at Bloomberg Invest 2026 to argue that the alternative asset management industry is entering a structural bifurcation he calls a "K-shaped industry," where firms with through-cycle discipline, global diversification, and linear deployment records will continue to compound, while those that overdeployed in 2021 face LP attrition, consolidation, and apology fund cycles.

Brookfield Asset Management CEO Connor Teskey and Invesco President and CEO Andrew Schlossberg sat down together at Bloomberg Invest 2026 to argue a deceptively simple thesis: bringing private markets to individual investors does not require changing what you invest in or how you invest it.

Private equity is reinventing itself, and the operators will outlast the noise.

What's New Bruce Richards, Founder and CEO of Marathon Asset Management, delivered the most pointed credit call at Bloomberg Invest 2026 , drawing a detailed parallel between the energy sector default cycle of 2016 to 2018 and what he believes is the coming default wave in direct lending to highly leveraged software companies. Richards argues that AI-driven pricing disruption, combined with eight to ten times leverage ratios and near-zero free cash flow after debt service, m

Private credit's retail stress is a confidence problem today and a credit risk if it lingers.