Borrowers look to private placements as substitute for bank lending

With banks showing reduced appetite for lending to small and medium-sized corporates, to what extent could institutional investors step into the breach, via either the private placements market or direct lending?

Going private: an alternative to bank lending?

An inevitable consequence of the financial crisis was that banks across Europe put up the shutters in terms of loan origination; and not just to smaller and medium-sized companies. Even solid investment grade names, who had got used to banks offering them massive loan facilities at single digit spreads in the heady, pre-crisis days, found that credit lines were either not renewed, or the terms of them had become far less favourable.

The political rhetoric coming from governments for banks to