Lending by nonbanks is now a trillion-dollar business
Lending by nonbanks is now a trillion-dollar business
It’s earnings season for the big banks, and so far, the results have been, well, mostly fine. Goldman Sachs reported a 51% jump in profit for last quarter on Tuesday. And despite Citigroup losing $1.8 billion that same quarter, the four biggest banks in the country — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank — saw earnings shoot up 11% year over year for the entire year.
Thing is though, if you’re a small- or medium-sized business, there’s a good chance the loan you took out to expand your company is not coming from those big banks. Or actually, any bank at all.
Let’s say you’re living your dream and own a small chain of boba tea cafes that also serve ribs. OK, maybe Boba-Q is just my dream.
But now let’s say you want to open a few more Boba-Q locations or vertically integrate your gigantic plastic straw supplier. You could go to your local bank and say, “Hey, give me a loan.” Or there’s another option.
“You instead have a hedge fund or a private equity firm that makes the same loan itself,” said Andrew Park, a senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform.
Now, the bank and those nonbank investment firms might offer you similar interest rates, but the nonbank might be a little more flexible on other terms, like how much more debt you can take on.
“You will see a lot of conditions that would traditionally be demanded by banks being waived by nonbank lenders,” Park said.
Private credit — the name for nonbank lending — has been very attractive to both medium-sized businesses and investors in recent years.
“The estimate right now is that private credit in the U.S. is about $1.4 trillion,” said Ruth Yang, a managing director with S&P Global Ratings.
For context, that’s basically the size of the entire U.S. junk bond market.
The case for private credit is that it’s filling a hole in the economy — post 2008, new regulations made banks more restrictive in business lending.
The case against private credit is banks are highly regulated for a reason. Private equity and hedge funds, not so much,
“They’re not even required to make the sort of fundamental disclosures of what their operations are like, what their financials look like, are those financials audited by a truly independent auditor,” said Alex Thornton, senior director of financial regulation at the Center for American Progress.
A lack of transparency isn’t slowing private credit though. Morgan Stanley projects the market could crack $2 trillion in just three years.
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