The 'Blame Game' In Private Credit Begins...

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

This morning I warned (again) this wasn’t a normal market in private credit. It was a liquidity event. And today it’s becoming something else too.

According to the Financial Times, the SEC is now questioning whether Egan-Jones, a small but deeply embedded credit rating agency in private credit, can “consistently produce credit ratings with integrity.” That’s not a routine inquiry. That’s the regulator openly wondering whether one of the key cogs in the machine was ever doing its job properly in the first place. Think S&P during The Big Short…

And the timing is almost too perfect.

Because just as gates go up, withdrawals get capped, and investors start asking for their money back, the conversation is shifting from “everything is fine” to “who signed off on this?”

That shift matters just as much as the redemptions.

For years, private credit sold stability. It worked because nobody had to test it. As long as money kept coming in and nobody needed to get out all at once, the system held together. You know, kinda like Madoff.

Now people are trying to get out, and suddenly the inputs behind those reassuring return streams — the marks, the models, the ratings — don’t look quite as solid. So naturally, we arrive at the part of the cycle where everyone starts looking around the room for someone else to blame...(READ THIS FULL COLUMN HERE).