Presenting What Next TBD: Why Everyone is Freaking out About Private Credit

What It Covers

Bloomberg's Odd Lots co-host Tracy Alloway explains the $1.3–3 trillion private credit market, its rapid growth from post-2008 "shadow banking" regulations, its heavy exposure to software and AI infrastructure financing, and why behavioral parallels to 2007–2008 warrant serious regulatory attention in 2026.

Key Questions Answered

• •Private Credit Scale vs. Speed: The private credit market has grown to between $1.3 and $3 trillion, surpassing the US junk bond market in size — a market that took decades to build. Investors should track this asset class not because of its absolute size relative to $60+ trillion in US equities, but because of its unprecedented growth velocity over just a few years.
• •Software Concentration Risk: A disproportionate share of private credit lending flows to software companies, which now face existential pressure from AI coding tools like Claude Code that can replicate SaaS products rapidly. Unlike manufacturing loans, these deals carry minimal hard asset collateral, meaning lenders cannot recover losses by seizing physical assets if borrowers fail.
• •Valuation Lag Problem: Private credit assets are priced quarterly by third-party services using triangulated estimates, not live market trades. This creates a structural lag where fund valuations may not reflect current conditions. In a rapid downturn, actual liquidation prices would likely fall well below the marks currently carried on fund books.
• •Bank Exposure Underestimated: Despite post-2008 Dodd-Frank restrictions, bank lending to non-depository financial institutions — including private credit funds — has reached $1.4 trillion, roughly 10% of total bank loan exposure, up from 1–2% a decade ago. Banks are also using synthetic risk transfers to manage this exposure, instruments that carry structural similarities to pre-2008 synthetic CDOs.
• •Retail Retirement Account Risk: A proposed Department of Labor rule would allow private credit and alternative assets into 401(k) portfolios. Individual investors lack the due diligence capacity to evaluate opaque, unrated, customized private credit deals. Treating retail retirement savers as a new liquidity source for an asset class facing institutional outflows creates asymmetric information risk for ordinary Americans.