Empréstimos inadimplentes da Blackstone sobem de 0,6% para 4,7% em 90 dias

What Happened

On February 25, Blackstone Secured Lending Fund (NYSE: BXSL), Blackstone’s flagship publicly traded direct-lending vehicle, told shareholders it had “only 0.6% of investments on non-accrual (at cost)” as of December 31, 2025. A non-accrual is lender-speak for a loan the fund has stopped counting interest on because it doubts the borrower will pay. It is the closest thing a private credit fund has to a public admission that a loan has gone bad.

Ninety days later, the same line in the same quarterly deck read very differently. As of March 31, 2026, “investments on non-accrual represent 4.7% of total investments” measured at amortized cost, or 3.1% measured at fair market value. Same fund, same accounting basis, one quarter:

$\frac{4.7\%}{0.6\%} \approx 7.8\times$

On June 1, Moody’s responded. It affirmed BXSL’s Baa2 investment-grade rating but revised the outlook from stable to negative, citing the fund’s elevated debt load and weakening asset quality, and handed the same negative outlook to Golub Capital BDC, whose non-accruals rose from 1.3% to 2.3% over the same quarter.

Key Details

• The driver was software, not factories: The largest of the three names added to non-accrual status was Medallia, a customer-experience software company that Thoma Bravo took private in October 2021 for $6.4 billion. Medallia sits at roughly 2% of BXSL’s $13.9 billion portfolio.
• Borrowing is above the fund’s own ceiling: BXSL ended Q1 2026 at 1.32x debt-to-equity, the second consecutive quarter above the top of its 1.0x to 1.25x target range, per Moody’s.
• Earnings absorbed the markdown: Net income fell to $25 million in Q1 2026 from $150 million a year earlier, while net investment income of $0.77 per share covered the $0.77 dividend with exactly zero margin. Dividend coverage was 133% as recently as the first quarter of 2023.
• The sector backdrop is a record: Fitch Ratings reported in May that the US private credit default rate reached a record 6.0% in April 2026.

Why It Matters

BXSL is not some yield-chasing afterthought. It is 97.6% first-lien senior secured debt, the most conservative tier of private credit, run by Blackstone, marketed on exactly the claim its February deck made: low non-accruals, disciplined underwriting, strong sponsors. If the safest-positioned public BDC (Business Development Company, a fund structure that lends directly to mid-sized firms) can watch its bad-loan ratio jump nearly eightfold in one quarter, the comfort everyone takes from “senior secured” deserves a second look.

The mechanism is rates. BXSL’s portfolio is 95.8% floating-rate debt. Floating-rate loans reset with the Federal Reserve, and the Fed is pinned: April CPI came in at 3.8% with real wages negative, an oil-war inflation print that takes rate cuts off the table. Every quarter the Fed holds, every floating-rate borrower keeps paying peak-cycle interest out of recession-grade cash flow. Software companies bought at 2021 valuations with 2021 debt loads are exactly where that math breaks first.

For Investors

The market has already rendered a quiet verdict. BXSL closed at $23.96 on June 9 against a stated net asset value of $26.26 per share as of March 31, a discount of nearly 9%. A discount that size on a fund that marks its own loans is the public market saying it does not fully believe the marks.

For the Industry

Private credit’s defenders have a real case, and it deserves a fair hearing. Moody’s affirmed the rating; this was an outlook change, not a downgrade. BXSL’s borrowers still showed high-single-digit EBITDA growth and 2.0x interest coverage, and its co-CEO Brad Marshall noted non-accruals rose “from historically low levels.” Medallia is backed by Thoma Bravo, and the Financial Stability Board found that sponsor-backed borrowers are less likely to slide from delinquency into outright default because the sponsor can inject cash.

But the same FSB report, published May 6, is blunt about the limits of that comfort: “Private credit remains untested to a prolonged economic downturn.” It found payment-in-kind (PIK) arrangements, a financial IOU that lets borrowers pay interest by adding it to the loan balance instead of paying cash, in roughly 12% of private credit loans, and rising since 2022. Non-accrual is what appears on the slide after the IOUs stop working.

The Backstory

The genuinely uncomfortable question is what the 0.6% was measuring. A loan does not go from performing to non-performing in 90 days; the borrower’s business deteriorates for quarters while the loan stays marked healthy. Private credit valuations are infrequent and discretionary, which is precisely the vulnerability the FSB flagged: “Valuations are often conducted less frequently and may involve significant discretion, which can amplify uncertainty during times of stress.” The 4.7% is not new damage. It is old damage, newly admitted.

That matters beyond Blackstone because the same machine is now financing the artificial intelligence buildout. Research cited in the FSB’s report projects roughly $800 billion of AI infrastructure capital spending will be met by private credit between 2025 and 2028. The site covered the most extreme example last week: Anthropic’s $36 billion TPU lease, syndicated by Apollo and Blackstone, only reaches investment grade because Broadcom cosigns it. The lenders writing those checks are the same funds now explaining why software loans from the last cycle stopped paying.

What’s Next

Watch three dates. Bloomberg reported on June 4 that redemption requests at private credit funds are climbing again after a brief calm, which pressures managers to sell exactly the loans nobody wants to price. BXSL’s second-quarter report in early August will show whether the three new non-accruals were the cleanup or the beginning. And every CPI print between now and then decides whether the Fed can rescue floating-rate borrowers at all.

The Bottom Line

A 0.6% bad-loan rate was the proof that private credit underwriting worked. A 4.7% rate one quarter later is proof of something else: the number was a snapshot of what managers had admitted, not of what borrowers could pay. The honest read is neither panic nor reassurance. Three newly admitted bad loans tipped the ratio, led by one Thoma Bravo software company, and that is genuinely idiosyncratic. But it tipped it inside a sector running record 6% defaults as of April, untested by any prolonged downturn, borrowed past its own targets, and lending into an AI buildout measured in hundreds of billions, all while war inflation holds the Fed’s rescue rope out of reach. The next 0.6% you see quoted, ask what it will read in 90 days.