‘Golden’ or ‘Garbage’: Milken Signals New Private Credit Era (1)

Months before Jamie Dimon’s infamous remark about more than one “cockroach” lurking in credit markets, TCW Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer Katie Koch warned 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 a year ago, before a crowd that included private-credit titans at the Milken Institute Global Conference.

Still, the caution was largely drowned out by the optimism around private credit in the wake of tariff-induced chaos in public markets. Ares Management Corp. CEO Mike Arougheti predicted ...