Crescent president says due diligence matters in credit investing

“There are lots of mixed signals out there,” says Chris Wright, president of Crescent Capital Group, on the latest episode of Credit Exchange with Lisa Lee. That’s creating uncertainty. “When we think about the investment environment, we approach it with caution.”On the bankruptcies of First Brands and Tricolor, Wright doesn’t see them as canaries in the coalmine or a tipping point in the economy. But they do show that due diligence matters. There were audit flags, governance failures, and opaque structures that sounded warning bells. “We have to be diligent in our work,” Wright notes.Crescent, a global credit manager with almost $50bn in AUM, recently launched a CLO ETF and has plans to introduce other product, Wright adds. While too early to say whether Crescent will start a European CLO management business, it’s “certainly something that is on our drawing board and we’re spending a lot of time thinking about and assessing,”, Wright says.