Blue Owl BDC's CEO Craig Packer speaks during an interview with CNBC on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., Nov. 19, 2025.
The latest tremor in the private credit world involved a deal that should've been reassuring to markets.
Blue Owl , a direct lender specializing in loans to the software industry, said Wednesday it had sold $1.4 billion of its loans to institutional investors at 99.7% of par value.
That means sophisticated players scrutinized the loans and the companies involved and felt comfortable paying nearly full price for the debt, a message that Blue Owl co-President Craig Packer sought to convey in interviews several times this week.
But instead of calming markets, it sent shares of Blue Owl and other alternative asset managers diving on fears of what could follow. That's because as part of the asset sale, Blue Owl announced it was replacing voluntary quarterly redemptions with mandated "capital distributions" funded by future asset sales, earnings or other transactions.
"The optics are bad, even if the loan book is fine," Brian Finneran of Truist Securities wrote in commentary circulated Thursday. "Most investors are interpreting the sales to mean that redemptions accelerated and led to forced sales of higher quality assets to meet requests."
Blue Owl's move was widely interpreted as the firm halting redemptions from a fund under pressure, even as Packer pointed out investors would get about 30% of their money back by March 31, far more than the 5% allowed under its previous quarterly schedule.
"We're not halting redemptions, we're just changing the form," Packer told CNBC on Friday. "If anything, we're accelerating redemptions."
— Source: CNBC Business (https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/20/blue-owl-software-lending-private-credit-concerns.html)
