Blue Owl Money Machine Sputters in Face of Private Credit Cracks

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Blue Owl Capital Inc.’s Craig Packer has been something of a mainstay on the New York Stock Exchange in recent years, ringing the opening bell multiple times to toast the private credit giant’s public funds.On Wednesday, minutes after the market opened, his mood was anything but celebratory.
Blue Owl had just announced it was scrapping a planned merger of two of its private credit funds, backtracking on a plan revealed Nov. 5 after scrutiny arose over the potential losses some investors would have to swallow as part of the deal. The parent company’s shares had fallen this week to the lowest level since 2023.
Packer bemoaned “negative articles” about private credit that caused its stock to sink. When it comes to Blue Owl’s business development companies, the firm’s co-founder said on CNBC, “there’s no emergency here.”
The abrupt reversal is a rare egg-on-face moment for Blue Owl, which for years has been held up as the poster child of the boom times in the $1.7 trillion private credit market. Created as a merger between Owl Rock Capital and Dyal Capital Partners in 2021, it has pitched itself as a one-stop financing shop that can compete with banks and the biggest alternative asset managers.
Today's show features:

• Bloomberg News Chief Correspondent for Private Capital Davide Scigliuzzo and Chief Wall Street Correspondent Sridhar Natarajan on the fallout from Blue Owl’s scrapped private-credit fund merger, and whether it portends further credit market pain
• Abby Roach, Senior Portfolio Analyst for the Empiric LT Equity Team with Allspring Global Investments, on quarterly earnings from Walmart and the outlook for the US consumer
• Lane Bess, CEO of Deep Instinct, Chairman of Blaize, and former CEO of Palo Alto Networks, on Nvidia’s impact on the broader market for semiconductors
• Brent Schutte, CIO at Northwestern Mutual Management, on the lack of timely government data contributing to uncertainty about the state of the US. economy

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