Private credit has spent the past year under a microscope. There have been questions about valuations and a growing list of allocators asking where the risk is actually hiding? In today’s episode of the Dakota Live! Podcast, Robert Morier sits down with Tom Majewski, Founder and Managing Partner of Eagle Point Credit Management, to take that question head-on. In this Episode, Rob and Tom dig into a Credit Manager's outlook for the next credit cycle. How this cycle may differ from a 2008-style shock, and how the current “slow-moving flush” may play out over years, much like commercial real estate. Tom talks about where AI will and won’t change credit investing, how he hires, and why Eagle Point invests its own capital in a strategy before offering it to clients. Eagle Point, a specialist credit manager, oversees approximately $14 billion across CLOs (Collateralized Loan Obligations), portfolio debt securities, regulatory capital relief, and other specialized areas of private credit. Tom founded the firm in 2012 in partnership with Stone Point Capital. Before that, he spent more than a decade structuring credit on the sell side, working on well over one hundred CLO transactions and relaunching the CLO business at Merrill Lynch. The conversation starts in the classroom. Tom explains what an allocator is actually buying when they own CLO equity. He describes a CLO as a better-built bank: a vehicle with long-dated, match-funded, non-mark-to-market liabilities that doesn’t depend on open capital markets to survive a drawdown. He walks through what that structure meant in 2008 and March 2020, and why loan prepayments may be the most underappreciated feature of the syndicated loan market. From there, Robert and Tom move to the strategy that has become Eagle Point’s largest: portfolio debt securities. These are senior loans to other private credit funds, built on the asset coverage framework of the Investment Company Act of 1940. Tom explains how it started as a niche personal trade and grew into an institutional business, and why sitting at the top of a fund’s capital structure looks different when headlines about middle-market lending turn negative. The episode connects directly to several of our recent conversations. Tom’s account of building Eagle Point with Stone Point’s backing adds to our GP seeding and GP stakes episodes with Taproot Capital and Rosemont. His work in middle-market infrastructure credit (small-scale solar, a hydrogen-fired backup plant for Calistoga, and a domestic battery-component manufacturer) is the lending side of the AI and power buildout we covered with EQT Infrastructure. Few people have seen this market from as many angles as Tom: as an auditor, a structurer, a banker, and now a founder and allocator of capital across the credit spectrum. Whether you’re evaluating a first CLO allocation, rethinking your private credit exposure, or trying to understand what’s behind the headlines, this episode explains how the structures underneath the market really work.
