The story started with Blue Owl. That was manageable, or so the argument went. An alternative asset manager hitting a rough patch in private credit...uncomfortable, but contained. Nobody needed to revise their macro outlook over that.
Then Blackstone. Then BlackRock.
Then Morgan Stanley capped withdrawals from its North Haven Private Income Fund at 5%, returning roughly $169 million to investors who had requested more than double that amount.
Then Cliffwater’s $33 billion flagship Corporate Lending Fund...investors tried to pull 14% of assets in a single quarter. They got 7%. Half.
Then Deutsche Bank disclosed €26 billion in private credit exposure, flagging it as a “key risk” in its annual report. The stock fell more than 7% in Frankfurt trading that same session.
All of this in the span of roughly a week.
There’s a Jamie Dimon line worth keeping in mind here: when you see one cockroach, there are probably more. What’s happening right now isn’t the end of the cockroach count. It’s the beginning. And every single time a major institution caps redemptions, the same narrative gets recycled...isolated stress, fortress balance sheets, contained exposure. It’s the same script they ran when Bernanke told Congress subprime was contained.
Different chapter. Same story.
So if the biggest names in finance are just now stepping forward to disclose their exposure, what does that tell you about which inning of this private credit crisis we’re actually in?
