Private Credit’s Birthplace Gives New Rise to 1980s-Style Greed

For the past several years, private credit shone bright as the latest form of the “junk” debt revolution — one that began in the 1980s with Michael Milken’s Drexel Burnham Lambert and spawned a broader universe of leveraged lending.

The core idea, then as it is now, is that high-yielding loans to debt-laden companies actually aren’t terribly risky in the aggregate, and offer premium returns in the long-run.