Talk Your Book: Private Credit’s Next Act

Alona Gornick, a managing director and senior investment strategist at Churchill Asset Management (part of Nuveen), spent her early career at Oaktree Capital during the post-GFC era, a time when distressed assets traded at deep discounts and capital was scarce. That experience gave her a front-row seat to a credit crisis where businesses failed because they had no access to new funding. Today, the private credit landscape looks almost inverted: there is an enormous amount of private capital available, and the biggest risk may not be a wave of defaults but a mismatch between investor expectations and the actual structure of the funds.

What private credit actually is — and what it isn’t

Private credit is not a single, uniform asset class. Gornick explains that the "middle market" — the core of direct lending — consists of private businesses with EBITDA (cash flow) ranging from roughly $10 million to $200 million, and revenues typically south of $1 billion. Within that, lenders specialize by size. Churchill focuses on the "core middle market," defined as companies with EBITDA between $15 million and $75–100 million. At this scale, deals are often sourced proprietarily, with only one or two lenders in a club, rather than the five, ten, or twenty participants common in larger syndicated loans. That matters because smaller lender groups have more aligned incentives. Everyone wh