The household names in private credit, with Craig Packer of Blue Owl

Private credit is attracting plenty of new faces these days, but as we wrote in this week’s Unicrunch newsletter, a handful of household names dominate fundraising and dealmaking.

Craig Packer is one of those names. Owl Rock, the direct lending firm he co-founded back in 2016, was already a power player in direct lending before it merged with Dyal Capital in 2021 to create Blue Owl; he’s now at the helm of one of private credit’s biggest brands, as investor interest in the sector is going mainstream.

For this week’s episode of the podcast, our private credit editor David Brooke sat down with Craig to talk about deals, documentation, retail investors and the threat of a recession — and Blue Owl’s efforts to dictate terms and keep lending standards tight.