ASWATH DAMODARAN: PRIVATE CREDIT IS THE NEXT CRISIS.
His framing starts with a question that nobody in the boom is asking. Who exactly are the lenders writing the checks to fund all these AI data centers? Shale oil companies borrowed heavily when oil was at $120 a barrel and got crushed when prices fell to $60. The same pattern is forming today in compute infrastructure, and the people putting up the capital are getting almost no scrutiny.
Damodaran does not see private credit as the sophisticated, intelligent alternative the marketing has positioned it as. He sees it as sheep. Every fund is chasing the same deals, the same sectors, and the same yield premiums that allegedly justify the structure. Intelligence in his view has been confused with confidence, and confidence in this corner of finance has compounded into something far more dangerous than the participants realize.
His broader point is that hedge funds, private equity, and private credit have all followed the same destructive arc. Each one began as a genuinely good niche business solving a real problem. Hedge funds 30 years ago produced positive alpha, beating passive investing by 3 to 5 percent annually. Today they look like expensive mutual funds, underperforming passive by roughly 1.5 percent. Private equity started as a focused, disciplined strategy for a small set of operators and has grown into a sprawling category that now struggles to deliver the returns that justified its emergence. Private credit had a legitimate original purpose, which was lending to borrowers that banks structurally could not serve.
What killed each of these businesses was the same disease. Overreach. A $200 billion niche business gets sold as a $20 trillion opportunity. When that scaling happens, sloppiness follows, bad actors enter the space, and the average quality of every participant deteriorates. The original alpha disappears not because the strategy stopped working, but because too much money chased too few good deals.
The danger with private credit is far more severe than the parallel problems in private equity and hedge funds. Equity investors take their losses and move on. Lending businesses, when they overreach, take others down with them. Banks. Pensions. Insurance companies. Sovereign wealth funds. The systemic linkages run far deeper than most participants understand, and the social costs of a real default cycle in private credit would extend well beyond the funds themselves.
Damodaran's warning is essentially that the industry is repeating the exact mistake that produced every previous credit crisis. Take a good idea, scale it past its natural capacity, attract bad actors with the promise of easy returns, and wait for the inevitable cycle that exposes how much of the underwriting was never serious in the first place.
@AswathDamodaran@FixedFloating
INDIA TO ALLOW IMPORT OF 378,000 UK CARS AT REDUCED TARIFFS UNDER LANDMARK TRADE PACT
India will permit the import of approximately 3.78 lakh (378,000) UK-made cars at concessional duty rates during the first 15 years of the India-UK trade agreement, marking one of the most significant automotive market-access concessions in the pact.
Ramdeo Agarwal on why Optimists become Rich in stock markets:
โI have a friend who used to speak only negative things on morning walk, like in Bihar this happened, in Jharkhand this is happening wrong.โ
โI gave him a challenge to speak 5 good things before telling me 1 negative thing. And then he became uncomfortable.โ ๐
โMy principle is not to allow negative guys around me.โ
โIf you want to be rich in stock market, please stay away from negative people.โ ๐ฅ
- Ramdeo Agarwal. 2017
"In India, the comman man always abuses the Rich and the Industrialists. This has become a fashion nowadays.โ
"For example, in any ceremony, a Filmstar and an Industrialist is present, the minister will first go and greet the Filmstar. So we should have the mindset of supporting industrialists"
- Vijay Kedia. Src: NDTV Profit
INDIAN NATIONAL ANTHEM IN SPAIN ๐ฎ๐ณ๐ฅน
The Indian Racer Kush Maini wins the FIA Formula 2 Sprint Race in the Barcelona, Spain
ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE BY KUSH ๐