upvote
Private credit is far different than the debt of a public ally traded company. It is far riskier as those companies can't easily tap the credit or equity markets for new money if they get into trouble the way a public company can.

But the debt we are talking about is not Private credit debt, its completely different animal with far different risk characteristics

reply
Found it: head of JP Morgan asset management calling "once in a lifetime opportunity to invest in high quality company debt" https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/10/jpmorgan-sees-once-in-a-gene...
reply
Different markets, that is public debt the op was talking about private credit.

I agree with JPM that now is a good time to invest in public debt.

reply
yeah, 10y US T-bills are nearing to 6%,this is actually excellent public debt :-D
reply
The problem with private credit is that most of the valuations are not publicly tested.

what do I mean by that? oracle is publicly traded, which means they (should) report profit loss and other key metrics in a standardised way. This means that one company's metrics should be comparable to others. Their value is assessed by the second on a public market. This means that anything that affects thier value (real or imagined) is reflected almost instantly. (same goes for debt)

Private credit, and the stuff its invested in, is much murkier. THey do not have the same public reporting rules. There is no testing of value. Its in the interest of the owner of that debt to talk up the value of the assets they hold.

This means that a fund might invest in 10 companies. Those companies might be doing well, or they might not. Because information is limited, and there are no public trades, the value of those companies are only ever tested at sale, or in a crisis. (ie they fold, or do something so public that they can't avoid the consequences.)

THe problem then is that because information is limited (was it a one off, did the owner hide the problem, did they use the wrong investment strategey, is the rest of the portfolio also over valued by 10x?) causes people to panic, and withdraw money.

Because private credit is not that liquid, it means that if people withdraw too much money, they either have to say "no we have no free cash" (lehman brothers insolvancy), they have to take out bridging loans (expensive and very short term) or sell assets (fire sales rarely get good value and shrink the credit supply)

All of which causes a panic, and people look at places like softbank, see the leverage and think "oh fuck thats not worth anything" and the bubble pops.

reply
Yep i'd say your comment fully agrees with me.
reply
TLDR;

Modern finance is basically a collaborative fiction. Its fine so long as everyone buys into the same narrative. As soon as someone says "no, why?" the whole thing falls of the rails.

reply
But luckily for the modern financial system, there are enough watchdogs lured with its narratives into willingness to enforce their coherency with weapons.
reply
Hah, this is remarkably short turnaround. The OBBB only lifted the ESLR on April 1!
reply
Had temporary acronym overload, unpacking for anyone else:

There was a cringe-named Republican bill from the beginning of Trump's term, it somehow(?) relaxed the Enhanced Supplementary Leverage Ratio, and the eSLR is one of several related rules on very big banks that deter them taking on "too much" risk.

reply
Wow, 2 lines in and I realize I already read this article waaay back, before I even knew what a startup was, much less who paul graham was.

The world is a napkin

reply
thank you for this link, all these years on the internet and I had not come across it
reply