(Yahoo! Finance) - JPMorgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon shrugged off worries about the private credit sector on Tuesday, saying that the concerns weren’t “systemic.”
“It almost can't be systemic at that size relative to anything else,” Dimon said during a Tuesday earnings call with analysts.
“You have to have very large losses in private credit before at least it looks like banks are going to get hit or something like that. So it doesn't mean you won't feel some stress and strain, and that you might have to do something about it, but I'm not particularly worried about it,” Dimon said.
Dimon also added that during a wider credit cycle downturn, some lending business “will probably come back to banks.”
The private credit industry has grown rapidly in the decade since the financial crisis, due in large part to US banking reforms that curtailed riskier lending.
Over the last quarter, private credit funds have seen elevated levels of investor redemption requests, spurring a growing number of managers to limit withdrawals to 5%.
The moment coincides with rising worry some private debt funds hold high exposure to software companies at risk of disruption from advances in artificial intelligence.
Big banks not only lend to these funds, but they also manage some of their own.
JPMorgan said earlier this year that the bank carries about $50 billion of exposure to the private credit industry.
On Tuesday other banks shared their exposure as well. Wells Fargo said it holds roughly $36 billion exposure to private credit firms. Citigroup said exposure to the industry was $22 billion as of the end of fourth quarter with zero losses since inception.
Giant money manager BlackRock (BLK), which also reported earnings Tuesday morning, played up the institutional opportunity in its newer private credit business.
CEO Larry Fink said his firm saw an aggregate $9 billion of net inflows into its private markets business during the quarter “led by private credit and infrastructure.”
"There's been a lot of attention on private credit, but the headlines do not reflect what clients are telling us, what our portfolio data shows or where we see the market going. Demand is structural. Private credit serves an important role in the financing ecosystems,” Fink said during a analyst call.
"Actually, institutional demand is accelerating,” he added.
On Monday, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon expressed a similar sentiment. Goldman’s non-public fund, the Goldman Sachs Private Credit Corporation, last week said it met quarterly redemption requests of 4.9% without having to limit withdrawals.
“There's going to continue to be some noise around the retail space,” Solomon said, adding that his firm has encountered fewer issues and its private debt business “continues with any sort of a medium-term or longer-term view to be a very, very attractive platform for us.”
By David Hollerith - Senior Reporter
April 14, 2026
