How worried should we be about private credit?

A private credit market growing so fast, away from the oversight of bank regulators, may be a new source of systemic risk. With smaller investors taking greater exposure to an asset class whose high returns and low losses look almost too good to be true, there could be trouble ahead.

The IMF is worried about the rapid growth of private credit and the potential for mis-valuations, hidden leverage and little understood linkages between investors and banks to unleash systemic risk in global finance.

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Banks have been complaining about an unlevel playing field for most of this decade, and regulators are now also raising the alarm.

The Bank of England devoted a large section of its December financial stability report to the topic, observing that heavily indebted businesses that have borrowed in risker credit markets, including leveraged loans and private credit, are particularly vulnerable to higher interest rates.

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