‘Golden’ or ‘Garbage’: Milken Signals New Era for Private Credit

Bloomberg reports that private credit's growth phase may be giving way to a more skeptical period, as framed at the 2026 Milken Institute Global Conference under the headline "Private Credit Golden Age Fades for Blue Owl, Ares." The article, published May 1, 2026 and updated later that day, opens by recalling that TCW Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer Katie Koch warned roughly a year earlier, before an audience that included private-credit leaders at the Milken conference, that the direct lending industry was due for a reckoning. "We are now going to start to see some of the accidents in this asset class," she said.

The article positions Koch's warning as having been validated by subsequent market events, noting it came months before Jamie Dimon's widely reported remark about more than one "cockroach" lurking in credit markets. Dimon's comment has become a shorthand for concerns about hidden weakness in lending, though the excerpt available does not detail specific loan losses, fund figures, or redemption data.

The headline names Blue Owl and Ares, two of the largest alternative asset managers with significant direct lending platforms, as the firms whose private credit franchises are at the center of the golden-age narrative. Readers should consult the full Bloomberg article for specifics on fund performance, asset levels, and the managers' own responses, which are not reflected in the source material provided here.