The Data Tapes

Setpoint's Bite-Sized Debt Newsletter: May Edition II

May 21, 2026

The Latest in ABS and Debt Markets

Welcome to The Data Tapes—your biweekly snapshot of private credit and ABS markets. In each edition, we bring you concise updates on debt financings, platform fundraises, data insights, market trends, and the latest from Setpoint.

🚀 What’s New at Setpoint

  • 💭 Reflections from Private Credit's Next Act: Setpoint and Blue Owl recently hosted a private panel discussion at a16z's San Francisco office. Brad Stroh, Co-CEO and Founder of Achieve captured insights from the conversation. Read his piece here. 

  • 💡 The Most Important Financial Institution Nobody Talks About Anymore: GE Capital was a $600B lending platform that shaped the ABF playbook Apollo, Ares, KKR, and others still run today. It’s been dead for five years, but its influence on the architecture of modern private credit is everywhere. More from Business Development & Partnerships Lead at Setpoint, Conor Witt, here.

  • 🔍 The Verification Agent Question Capital Providers Aren’t Asking: When you buy a house, you don't trust the appraiser the seller recommends; so why do capital providers let borrowers choose their verification agent? More from Setpoint’s SVP of Growth, Bart Steenbergen, on why capital providers should rethink how verification agents get selected: 2 min read.

  • 🌆 Upcoming Setpoint Events:

    • LAST CHANCE — Capital Conversations Summer Kickoff — June 2: Join Setpoint and Cross River for Capital Conversations, a happy hour bringing together the asset-backed finance community in NYC. ​Apply to attend.

  • 🤝 We're on the road — let's connect:

    • IMN's Residential Mortgage Securitization, June 3 — New York, NY | Meet with us.

    • Global ABS, June 9-11 — Barcelona, Spain | Meet with us.

💸 Debt Financings & Acquisitions

💰️Platform Growth

📈 Visuals

🗣️ Market Commentary

  • “The [AI infrastructure capital requirement] numbers are massive, you're absolutely right. This is the big question that every buyside investor is trying to get their grips around. There’s a couple of numbers out there. $5 trillion is the total hyperscaler capex over the next five years. If you think through what’s happened in Investment Grade so far, we’ve had $150B already this year. That same time last year was $20B. High yield, $40B this year. Same time last year, $0. So it really has become exponential in the volume we’re seeing.” - David DeBoltz, JPMorgan US Leveraged Finance Managing Director on demand for capital in the AI and Data Center ecosystem

  • "Perceived or actual stale valuations may create a first-mover incentive during stress events, leading investors to exit a fund before asset values are potentially marked down. Managers may have potential incentives to manage valuations of their funds in a way that minimises the appearance of volatility, such as by delaying or spreading out the impact of negative shocks that could reduce asset values." — FSB, Report on Vulnerabilities in Private Credit, on valuation opacity and redemption dynamics

  • “PE-backed software, lenders took solace in the fact that you were a low loan--to-value. You would overlook high leverage multiples and would take comfort in the fact that someone was buying the business and you were lending at 40 cents on the dollar relative to the purchase price. At the end of the day, at 40% LTV, you might be 8-10x levered, all of your cash flows goes to support the debt service. When you have all of your cash flow supporting debt service you can’t invest in the future of the business.” - Tony Minella, CEO of Eldridge Capital Management, on the Pitfalls of LTV-Driven Underwriting in PE-Backed Software 

  • “More recently, semi-liquid private BDCs have been all the rage for public alts managers to raise. Promising liquidity in illiquid assets. $300B raised over the last 5-6 years. Why? Fees. If you can do a $1-2B unitranche deal and put a first lien and second lien into your CLO, you make 40 bps. Putting it into a private BDC, you make 6-7x that number. Why? FRE FRE FRE. Multiples expanded dramatically for public alts managers, driving their stocks higher, with a huge amount of the growth from private credit, from lev fin direct lending. M&A picks up. If you don’t own a private credit business, you have to buy one. When you have that much money to deploy and that much interest in the asset class and you have to raise more to drive your stock higher, how are you going to deploy it? You build an industrial scale deployment platform.“ - Scott Goodwin, Co-Founder and CIO of Diameter Capital Partners, on the Fee Incentives Driving Industrial-Scale Private Credit Deployment 

📖 What We’re Reading & Listening To

Reading

  • AI Eats the World (Benedict Evans)

  • Dispersion Revisited (Oaktree)

  • Goldman-backed Lendable plots US expansion after outpacing banks on loans (FT)

  • The Crypto Borrowing Gap (Ledn & Protocol Theory)

  • Wall Street Takes Its Cut of $34 Trillion in US Homeowner Wealth (Bloomberg)

  • WTF Is Going On In Private Credit? (Diameter)

Podcasts & Interviews