Traci Alloway

So they also saw a need to finance their LBOs that was no longer able to be done at the banks.

So they started a number of different fund structures.

The BDC fund structure had been around prior to the financial crisis, but these dedicated private credit funds really began to proliferate after the financial crisis.

Can I just add something to that?

Just from a historical perspective, I also think that we've been talking about private credit as it stands today, but it started so much earlier and it started in an area that I think most people will tend to forget about, which is GE Capital was one of the largest providers of private credit under the GE umbrella for many, many, many years.

They were financing lots of different things, though.

They were financing rail cars.

They were financing aircraft engines.

They were financing

the purchase of MRIs and other healthcare equipment.

And they were extraordinarily successful and really largely responsible for a big chunk of the profits that came in underneath the GE umbrella for many years.

But what it did is it created a large body of really experienced lenders who ultimately splintered off and went into different areas in the businesses.

And one of the businesses that started from them was a company called Heller Financial, which

had been around for a while, but they hired some GE Capital guys to come in.

And they really kind of took the original Heller business, which was financing yellow equipment and rail cars and things, into the middle market LBO space.

So they became critical providers of financing for that space at a time when there really weren't many away from the bank.

So

A lot of this has been around for a long time.

People just forget about it because there's not as many people out there that are as old as we are that remember those guys from the 80s and 90s.

You saw that with a lot of the consolidation of the financial institutions.