BRUCE RICHARDS

Richards spent 15 years on Wall Street before founding his firm, including a decade as a managing director in the fixed-income divisions of Smith Barney and Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette, where he ran a trading desk doing principal investments and market making. In 1998 he co-founded Marathon Asset Management with Lou Hanover.

Marathon grew into a global credit manager covering high-yield, leveraged loans, CLOs, emerging-market debt, structured credit and private lending, with assets north of $20 billion. Richards became one of the most quoted voices on the private-credit boom, appearing constantly on CNBC and Bloomberg to argue the sector is still early in its growth.

Marathon Asset Management, formerly Smith Barney and Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette

Richards runs a credit shop, which means Marathon makes money by lending and by buying debt, not by owning stocks. The firm spreads across public credit, like high-yield bonds and leveraged loans, and private credit, meaning direct loans to companies that do not go through public markets.

It also does distressed and special situations, buying the debt of troubled companies, plus asset-based lending against things like aircraft. Richards is a top-down thinker who watches the Federal Reserve closely and sizes his bets around where he thinks rates and defaults are heading.

Building Marathon from a 1998 startup into a $20-billion-plus global credit firm is the headline achievement. The deeper win is timing the private-credit wave.

As banks retreated from lending after the 2008 crisis and again as rates rose, Marathon positioned to fill the gap, and Richards has been one of the sector's most visible champions as it ballooned into a trillion-dollar market.

Richards does not publicly catalog his losers, so no single blowup is easy to confirm. The clearest risk is baked into his own warnings.

He has flagged that private credit is dangerously concentrated in software companies carrying huge debt loads. If those loans default at the rates he fears, the golden era he keeps describing could turn painful, and firms leaning hard into that lending, potentially including parts of his own market, would feel it.

Richards believes private credit is in the middle of a historic expansion, not the end of one. He has predicted the sector will double in size within a few years.

His core view is that banks have pulled back from lending, and firms like Marathon are stepping into that gap to lend directly to companies at attractive yields. He treats the Federal Reserve as the single most important variable, arguing that where rates settle decides who gets paid and who defaults.

Richards is married to Avis Richards, an award-winning filmmaker and philanthropist who founded the Birds Nest Foundation in 2005. Together they run a family foundation and fund scholarships for military veterans.

He is based in New York.

Richards earned an economics degree from Tulane University, graduating summa cum laude and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. The academic honors matter here because credit investing is a numbers-heavy, detail-obsessed job, and he came in wired for it.