Am I wrong thinking this is similar to the housing loan crisis of 2008? This is just another form of that "shadow banking" system isn't it?

You'll find plenty of talking heads on YouTube right noe claiming exactly this. Time will tell if private equity is actually wound up as tight as housing was in the GFC.

I don't think you're wrong if the following holds true: Before the housing bubble burst, banks lent funds to countless borrowers who couldn't, ultimately, afford their mortgage payments (because the banks didn't do their due diligence when underwriting the loans). This was widespread across pretty much every bank and mortgage banker. Not sure of the actual percentage of borrowers who, when all was said and done, had no business getting a mortgage for a house or condo, but suffice it to say it was well into the double digits percentage-wise (there's much more to this than simply banks and borrowers with Wall St. playing a major role in the collapse, but just keeping things simple).

In this private credit situation the analog for the banks are these private credit funds that have raised the capital they've lent from institutions and high-net-worth individuals (as opposed to banks, which have funds from consumer deposits). The analog to the individual mortgage borrowers from 2008 are actual companies.

To connect the dots, if the private credit funds were like the banks pre-2008, where due diligence was an afterthought, then this could turn out to be similar. So the real question is: are the borrowers (businesses in this case) swimming naked? Or do you believe the private credit funds when they say they actually conducted a good amount of due diligence when extending their loans? Once you know the percent of the companies that are naked you can evaluate whether this could/would end up similar to 2008. Nobody knows that yet, even, I suspect, the private credit funds themselves.

Yes, instead of banks lending sub prime mortgages directly, it's as if they are lending to private equity groups who are then lending rather undiscerningly. Within the last week, we now have Blackstone, Blackrock, Owl, and Morgan Stanely limiting withdrawals on private credit funds. Not a good look...

Even the best due diligence can't do anything if a crisis (not necessarily banking-related, a Middle East might just do the trick) starts manifesting itself and now many of those businesses have issues in paying down the debt they owe.

Late to reply here, but, yes, agree generally, though I don't think what these private credit companies are being accused of falls into that category (i.e., I think they're being accused of playing fast and loose with their due diligence, which was baked into their competitive advantage over the banks themselves. The competitive advantage being "we'll close quickly" without all the fuss a bank would require).

I've had quite a few conversations with someone who claims to be in the know about this situation (though, really, I don't think they're any more in the know than anyone!) and they swear up and down it's all a misunderstanding, which, cynic though I may be, immediately makes me think the accusations are at least somewhat true.

"I did my due diligence but didn't anticipate these risks". Doesn't sound like due diligence to me. Not having a plan to unwind your position if SHTF doesn't sound like due diligence to me. You can argue it any way you like but it boils down to "The money was good and I didn't think the worst was gonna happen".

I agree with this and tend to think due diligence needs to not only account for the regular course of business, but also for the exceptional circumstance. You'll never be able to accuse someone of not thinking of the exceptional UPSIDE circumstance, of course. The problem is the complete ignorance of the exceptional downside. That said, your parent is right that you can't really do due diligence on "war in Iran." Instead you something like "ok, if there's a shock to the system and 20% of our loans default what does that mean for our business?"

My comment was mostly against the idea that due diligence is a silver bullet, it isn’t. Of course that it can “catch” the most egregious cases, like outright fraud, but, again, no due diligence process can read the future.

> This is just another form of that "shadow banking" system isn't it?

Private-credit lenders are literally shadow banks [1]. But I'd be cautious about linking any shadow banking with crisis. Tons of useful finance occurs outside banks (and governments). One could argue a classic VC buying convertible debt met the definition.

That said, the parallel to 2008 is this sector of shadow banking has a unique set of transmission channels to our banks. The unexpected one being purely psychological–when a bank-affiliated shadow bank gates redemptions, investors are punishing the bank per se.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-bank_financial_institution