Brookfield Credit Quarterly and Private Credit Papers
Brookfield's credit leaders, including Oaktree's Armen Panossian, write a quarterly view on rates, spreads and stress, plus clear papers on asset-based finance and on specialization in private credit.
Free to read
Brookfield's insights page collects work from across the group, including Howard Marks's memos. For private credit readers, the most useful pieces come from the credit group's co-CEOs, Armen Panossian and Robert O'Leary. Their Credit Quarterly is a short, plain view of the credit cycle. The October 2026 edition, New Terms, argued that rates have stayed high despite repeated hopes for cuts, that high yield bonds near 8 percent and floating-rate loans above 9 percent offer real income, and that heavily levered 2021 and 2022 buyouts are creating demand for rescue financing.
The white papers go deeper. Accessing the Next Layer of Private Credit, also written with executive chair Craig Noble, argues that returns increasingly depend on specialized skills in opportunistic credit, real estate and infrastructure debt, and asset-based finance, and it flags payment-in-kind interest, sector concentration and looser underwriting as risks. A short explainer, What Is Asset-Backed Finance, shows how loans are repaid from pooled asset cash flows held in a special-purpose vehicle, not from a single company's earnings.
Read the quarterly for the cycle view and the explainer for the mechanics.
Start with
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1
Credit Quarterly: New terms
A concise view on what higher-for-longer rates mean for lenders and over-levered borrowers.
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2
What is asset-backed finance?
The clearest short primer on the fastest-growing corner of private credit.
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3
Accessing the next layer of private credit
Maps the specialty credit segments beyond direct lending and the risks building in them.