La Caisse leans on disciplined spreads and data centre loans to keep private credit edge
Private credit delivered a 9.6 percent return for Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec in a year when the pension manager missed many of its other benchmarks and the fund is not backing away from the asset class.
In an interview with Bloomberg News, Vincent Delisle, head of liquid markets, said, “We love the contribution that private credit brings to our fixed income book. We love the contribution it brings to the global construction of our portfolio.”
La Caisse plans to deploy $6bn to $8bn a year net in private credit.
At the end of 2025, it had $68bn of private credit exposure, with an objective to get above $100bn by 2030. The teams are set up to deploy roughly $20bn a year, but redemptions and repayments have limited net growth.
As an example, Delisle said that last year the fund deployed $21bn, received $17bn in repayments and ended with $4bn net.
Delisle acknowledged to Bloomberg that private credit at this scale has not been tested through a full credit cycle.
“You’re right, there hasn’t been a credit cycle since 2008,” he said, adding that the same question could be asked of public equities because “there hasn’t been a real prolonged scare, a profit recession, in a very long time.”
Some of the current anxiety in the US$1.8tn private credit arena stems from exposure to technology companies whose business models may be at risk from new artificial intelligence tools.
Blue Owl Capital Inc. chose to sell assets to return capital after withdrawal requests, while JPMorgan Chase & Co. chief executive officer Jamie Dimon said he is starting to see parallels with the pre-financial crisis era as lenders do “some dumb things.”
Delisle told Bloomberg he believes “the noise is exaggerated.”
He said he would be more concerned “if we were at a juncture of where recession risks were alarmingly high, which they’re not.”
He pointed to “strains stemming from Blue Owl, one of their products that they’re trying to close, the software exposure,” but said La Caisse has a diversified portfolio.
On Blue Owl’s loans that two other Canadian pension funds bought in February, he said, “We didn’t look into it.”
On process, Delisle said every loan goes through an arbitrage between public and private markets.
“If we don’t get the documentation, if we don’t get the spread that we want over the public equivalent, then we’re not doing it,” he told Bloomberg.
As more players enter private credit, “the spreads that we’re making above public will be eroding,” so “if we don’t get the equivalent premium relative to public [debt], we’re going to go public.”
He said La Caisse walks away from more private deals when public spreads move.
As an example, he cited last spring’s “Liberation Day,” when public credit spreads widened and the fund slowed private credit deployment because “we got better deals on the public side.”
Delisle also highlighted the fund’s approach to AI-related risk and opportunity.
He told Bloomberg the key question is how much benefit to assign to the “winners of AI” and how much pain to the “perceived losers of AI.”
He noted that hyperscalers’ stocks had jumped with each new spending announcement until last fall, when the market began to ask, “Hey, are you guys spending too much?”
This year, “memory is leading” and “the foundries are winning, not the hyperscalers,” while software engineering is perceived as a “massive” loser.
La Caisse has 5 percent of its book allocated to data centres and prefers to do that on the credit side rather than equity.
Delisle said the firm lends to large-cap tech names with solid free cash flow, but he now sees “hyperscalers spending like drunken sailors,” driving that cash flow lower.
He warned that this could hit valuations and how stable and dominant their stocks appear, even as they continue to borrow to fund new data centres.
He said the team is trying to keep that credit exposure contained, though “we do have some exposure out there.”
He added that La Caisse structures its own transactions: “We set up our own deals one by one. We set up the governance, the documentation. These are loans that made on the three- to four-year windows. So they’re actually quite liquid.”
On broader allocation, Delisle said La Caisse reallocated equity exposure into European financials, Japanese industrials and financials, and Korean technology over the past year.
On the credit portfolio, by contrast, US exposure rose from 29 percent to 41 percent after the fund took profits in emerging-market debt and reallocated to corporate credit and US bonds.
“We do not believe that we need to get away from the US everywhere,” he told Bloomberg.
Looking back at 2025, he said that “equities [were] performing at 18 percent. You get credit performing at 10 percent, you get infrastructure performing at 10 percent.”
He cautioned it will not be like that every year, but said La Caisse is “not going to shift our strategy because of the strains that we’re seeing right now.”
