By Matt Wirz
Private-credit investments held by U.S. life insurance companies jumped 21% -or $83 billion- in 2025, more than double the 9% growth of overall assets, according to research by Barclays.
Insurers aren't at risk of the massive investor withdrawals hitting private-credit funds, but they may not be reserving enough capital to cover potential losses from the investments, Barclays said. The private credit ratings assigned to the deals might be too high, resulting in insufficient balance-sheet offsets.
Overall private-credit investments were $482 billion at the end of December. The holdings, often bought from large private fund managers like Apollo Global Management, now make up 8% of insurers' overall $6 trillion of assets, up from about 7% in 2024.
Insurers with the largest portion of private-credit investments include:
-- Apollo affiliate Athene (14%, compared with 11% in 2024)
-- KKR affiliate Global Atlantic (14%, compared with 15% in 2024)
-- F&G Annuities & Life (17%, up from 11%)
-- MassMutual (16%, compared with 15%).
Most of the investments are asset-backed debt with investment-grade credit ratings, rather than private loans to corporations with junk ratings held by many private-credit funds sold to individual investors.
"The resiliency of these structures depends heavily on how robust the methodology is that was used to rate them," Barclays said. "We believe that investors are somewhat skeptical of this, and we don't blame them ... smaller rating agencies with more limited track records could be determining how much credit enhancement these private credit structures need to achieve IG ratings."
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 16, 2026 14:29 ET (18:29 GMT)
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