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Market concerns over private credit are overblown, said Jenny Johnson, the chief executive officer of Franklin Templeton, adding that the borrowers that have been subject to the most scrutiny – enterprise software companies – will be able to repay their borrowings.
AI has spooked individual investors in private credit funds because they have lent heavily to the software industry. Many investors have sought to cash out of these funds, even though the terms of these investments are not designed to be treated as liquid products.
There hasn’t been an increase in delinquencies within Franklin Templeton’s $100 billion portfolio of private credit assets, Johnson said Tuesday at Semafor World Economy in Washington, DC. In fact, some of the borrowers are outperforming their projections.
“This is what happens when the market overreacts to something,” Johnson said. “If you lent to a company that had a good installed base and good cash flow,” they’re going to repay the debt.
While AI may indeed supplant enterprise software companies in the future, it’s a process that will occur over decades rather than the next several years, Johnson said. By that time, software companies will have repaid any debt that is currently on their balance sheets.
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Alternative assets such as private credit have come to play a big role at firms such as Franklin Templeton, one of several mid-sized mutual fund managers that have been steadily losing assets to less-expensive passive index funds. To offset this trend, Franklin Templeton has been buying up firms that run private funds that can charge higher fees.
Johnson acknowledged that private credit investments are “absolutely illiquid.” But she said it’s important for investors to hold alternative assets such as venture capital and private credit because their compounded returns over time can exceed those of more traditional securities, such as Treasuries and publicly issued corporate bonds.
Anthony Scaramucci, the founder and managing partner of Skybridge Capital, had a different take than Johnson on private credit. Speaking alongside her at Semafor World Economy, Scaramucci said that he had passed on investing in the asset class, adding that the lack of regulation in the asset class had caused “unnecessary strife” in the economy.
Lending “should never have migrated out of the banks the way it did,” Scaramucci said, “because inside the banks there were stricter underwriting standards, and you wouldn’t have had the fiasco that’s brewing now. ”
Skybridge Capital started out as a fund of funds, allocating investor capital to money managers. In recent years, however, Scaramucci has been a big proponent of digital assets and his flagship SkyBridge Opportunity Fund has loaded up on cryptocurrency and digital assets — mainly through third-party investment funds — as well as exchange traded funds that hold Bitcoin and other crypto currencies.
“Put your money into crypto, brother,” Scaramucci said.