Boaz Weinstein warns of private credit’s 'financial alchemy,' says problems are multiplying by the quarter

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Inside Alts: Saba Capital’s Boaz Weinstein on private credit’s liquidity problem

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A version of this article appeared in CNBC’s Inside Alts newsletter, a guide to the fast-growing world of alternative investments, from private equity and private credit to hedge funds and venture capital. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.

The problems in private credit are “multiplying by the quarter,” due in part to the “financial alchemy of promising liquidity that isn’t there,” Boaz Weinstein, founder of Saba Capital Management, told Inside Alts this week.

“What’s happening, big picture, right now is that, for a number of reasons, in the middle of a bull market, there are cracks, there are problems, there are frauds, there are companies that are going bad without being a fraud,” Weinstein said in an exclusive interview. “So for those reasons, investors are seeing their dividends being cut. They want their money back, and [on] Wall Street the No. 1 story right now is where the redemption is going to be for all these managers.”

Weinstein, of course, is a central figure in that story. His firm, Saba, alongside Cox Capital Management, just launched a tender offer to purchase 6.9% of shares in one of Blue Owl’s nontraded private credit funds at a 34.9% discount.

“We were hearing from investors in these funds that they wanted their money back,” he said. “They were trying to find someone to step into their shoes, so that happened in an organic way.”

That fund, known as Blue Owl Capital Corp. II, halted quarterly redemptions and sold $1.4 billion of direct lending investments to provide liquidity for its investors. It turned out to be among the first in a slew of nontraded, private credit funds that have been hit with redemption requests above the typical 5% quarterly cap.

Private wealth flows across products tracked by analysts at Jefferies were down 19% in the first quarter compared with Q4. Analysts said they expect redemption rates across retail credit products to increase.

Saba and Cox see an opportunity amid investors’ limited liquidity. They are launching similar tenders for stakes in several other funds at Blue Owl as well as Starwood Real Estate Income Trust. This has caused some to question whether Weinstein has been criticizing the private credit industry only to scare retail investors into selling their stakes to him at a discount.

While speaking with Inside Alts, Weinstein clarified that he doesn’t actually believe there will be a wave of private credit defaults or frauds, nor does he think people should redeem further. (“The redemptions have arrived,” he said.)

In fact, he’s actually bullish on several of the largest private credit managers. Weinstein said over the past few weeks, he bought shares in “the most amazing managers,” including Ares, Apollo and Blackstone. He said he is even long “a little bit” of Blue Owl equity.

“We’re long the stocks of these companies on the idea that, in case this is overdone, these are the guys that are going to be the winners at the end, when the smoke clears and their stocks may represent good value,” said Weinstein.

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Weinstein said he thinks private credit is trading at pessimistic levels and public credit is trading at “incredibly optimistic levels.” He’s shorted public credit through credit default swaps and credit derivatives. Weinstein said that the gating of private credit funds means that investors will have to sell more liquid assets to raise cash, which would weigh on the market.

“I think that public credit is incredibly mispriced and part of my short-term thinking about it is informed by the issues that the private credit markets are having,” he said.

Weinstein said it will be a “number of weeks” before they know what happens with the Blue Owl bids, and how much they’ll end up buying. Weinstein said the tender offers weren’t “personal” against the manager, but rather, he said, “if we go bid for something, it’s a sign we think the manager is good.”

However, Weinstein noted a firm called Cliffwater as one in the private credit space that they’re “watching the most closely.” He said Cliffwater operates similarly to a fund-of-funds model, where they don’t own the loans directly, but rather, they’re invested in other managers. As a result, they have limited control over fulfilling their own redemption requests – something Weinstein describes as a “turducken” (a chicken stuffed inside a duck, stuffed inside a turkey).

According to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Cliffwater disclosed that as of the end of last year, 69% of its Corporate Lending Fund was comprised of direct investments in underlying credit and the remaining 31% was exposed to funds.

Weinstein predicted that when Cliffwater announces its redemption rate — expected as early as Tuesday — it could be between 10% and 20%.

“I don’t know their exact cash position, but we think it’s very likely that they’re going to have to start redeeming and they’re going to get cut back when they redeem these funds that they’ve invested in,” he said.

Cliffwater declined to comment.

Cliffwater was also the subject of a recent viral investor letter by the hedge fund Rubric Capital, which said the alternatives manager could be “a canary in a coal mine” and “the first domino in the bank run we foresee,” according to The New York Times, which cited two people who read the private note.

When asked about what happens to private credit if there’s a real credit cycle, Weinstein said, “it will fall harder than it should.”

He added that “one of the best opportunities” in his career would be investing in private credit at a massive discount “when the economy slows.”

“Maybe that’s not for a year, maybe it’s about to happen. Maybe it’s going to happen years from now,” Weinstein said. “It’s about to get super interesting.”

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