Matt Levine, Columnist

Private Credit Wants to Be the Bank

Also failed M&A, OpenAI restructuring and Bitcoin adoption.

December 19, 2024 at 6:44 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Programming note: This is the last Money Stuff of 2024. Happy holidays, and thanks so much for reading this year. We’ll be back on Monday, Jan. 6, 2025.

One of the big stories of modern finance is the rise of narrow banking in the form of private credit. “Narrow banking” is, in banking theory, roughly the idea that banks shouldn’t make loans. Instead: