BlackRock brushes off wider credit contagion fears after First Brands, Tricolor bankruptcies

By Prakhar Srivastava and Anirban Sen

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Asset manager BlackRock on Tuesday played down concerns of broader credit market stress after the bankruptcies of auto parts supplier First Brands and lender Tricolor Holdings, saying the overall credit quality of borrowers was “generally strong.”

On a post-earnings conference call with analysts, BlackRock’s finance chief Martin Small said that recent private credit bankruptcies were largely tied to some pockets of debt capital markets, including syndicated bank loans and collateralized loan obligations, and not to direct lending portfolios managed by large private credit firms.

“The reported cases look more like idiosyncratic pockets of stress and things like deep subprime, or again where there’s been potential fraud reported. T