GermsOfWar @germsofwar

🚨 PRIVATE CREDIT MAY BE THE TRIGGER FOR THE NEXT FINANCIAL CRISIS. Private credit defaults just hit their highest level ever recorded. Fitch's U.S. Private Credit Default Rate hit 6.0% through April 2026. That's the highest since this data started being tracked in 2024. Just three months earlier, in January, it was 5.8%, which was already a record at the time. For all of 2025, defaults came in at 9.2%, beating the old record of 8.1% set in 2024. And the real number is worse than what's reported. Some borrowers are avoiding an official default by paying their interest with more debt instead of cash. This is called a PIK loan. The lender still counts it as income, even though no actual cash came in. This practice has more than doubled since 2022, from 5% to 11% of all private credit loans. Companies using this method have pushed their debt up to 76% of their total assets, up from 40% three years ago. It's a way of delaying a default, not avoiding one. Two of the biggest lenders, Ares Capital and Blue Owl, both said around 15% of their income last year came from these non-cash payments. The clearest real example of the risk is Medallia. Thoma Bravo bought the software company for $6.4 billion in 2021. Its revenue later stalled because of AI competition, and lenders had to take control of the company. $5.1 billion in shareholder value was wiped out, and the loans were marked down to 60 cents on the dollar. Blackstone, Apollo, and FS KKR all took losses on this deal. Software companies are a big part of the risk here, making up somewhere between 19% and 35% of private credit loans, depending on the estimate. Morgan Stanley expects 11% of these loans to come due by the end of 2027, with another 20% due the year after. That's when companies will need to refinance old debt, and many may not be able to on the same terms. At the same time, investors are trying to pull their money out of these funds. In the first quarter of 2026, they requested $13.9 to $20 billion in withdrawals. Only about $7.4 billion, roughly half, was actually paid out. Some investors selling their positions on the secondary market are accepting 30% to 65% less than the fund's stated value, just to get their cash back sooner. The part that gets the least attention is who actually holds this risk. U.S. life insurance companies hold $849 billion in private credit. If defaults keep rising, insurers are the ones who absorb it, not banks. That risk moves quietly through retirement and insurance policies, long before it shows up as a major headline. Warren Buffett has said the risk is more serious than that, pointing to how connected banks already are to this market. Either way, the default rate is already at a record, and the loans most at risk from AI disruption haven't come due yet.

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

Tech stocks are experiencing one of their most volatile periods in history: The ratio of the Nasdaq 100 volatility index, $VXN, to the S&P 500 volatility index, $VIX, is up to 1.7 points, the highest in 23 years. This marks the first time since 2018 that the ratio has surpassed 1.5 points. By comparison, during the 2008 Financial Crisis, this metric peaked at ~1.6 points. This comes as $VXN stands at 28 points while the $VIX is at 16 points, or 43% lower. $VXN has now been above 20 points for 5 consecutive months, the longest streak since the 2022 bear market. The market is pricing-in severe volatility in tech.

S&P 500 Stock Put/Call Skew just fell to its lowest level ever recorded 🚨🚨 Bulls are all-in, Bears have vanished 🤯

Thierry from arvy 🇨🇭 @ThierryBorgeat

6 days ago

The S&P put/call skew just collapsed to 0.71. Not a low. The lowest reading on record. The 10-year average is 12. The 2020 panic peaked at 34. We're at 0.71. What this measures: how much investors pay to protect against a crash versus betting on a rally. At 0.71, crash

66 228 1K 321K 590

Fund Managers are now sitting on the lowest cash allocation in history 🚨

@KobeissiLetter Just wait till the stock market falls in the fall. This will reverse.

My entire AI stack is now Chinese 🇨🇳 87% cheaper. same revenue swaps by task: 1. reasoning / backend brain Opus 4.8 → Kimi K2.7 benchmark gap: ~8% · price: ~11x cheaper 2. code generation GPT-5.5 → Qwen 3.7 Max benchmark gap: ~18% · price: ~7x cheaper 3. agent loops + tool calling Sonnet 4.7 → GLM 5.2 benchmark gap: ~3% · price: ~5x cheaper on input 4. cheap volume / bulk processing GPT-5.5 mini → MiMo V2.5 benchmark gap: ~6% · price: ~12x cheaper 5. image generation GPT-Image-2 → Wan 2.5 benchmark gap: ~5% · price: ~8x cheaper 6. video generation Sora 2 → Kling 3.0 benchmark gap: roughly equal · price: ~6x cheaper [ result after 30 days: ] operating costs dropped 87%, output quality dropped 4% on average, revenue unchanged the most important that these models will be not banned in a month and i can run them locally nobody will steal my data and i can learn them as i need full article drops tomorrow with: > exact routing logic per task type > the 2 cases where I still pay for American > the migration playbook anyone can copy in a weekend VERY IMPORTANT to get migrated now, while it's not too late

Margin Debt as a % of M2 is now at its 2nd highest level in history, just behind the Dot Com Bubble 🚨🚨

BREAKING 🚨: Commercial Real Estate Office CMBS Delinquency Rate hits 12.3%, the highest level in history 👀

@CryptoTweets Robert Kiyosaki has been wrong for so long, I'm suprised anyone listens to him anymore

@RepThomasMassie Representative Massie, admire your pluck. However, I disagree with this statement. They are still private companies, US only took a stake in the open market. That is fair.

@NoLimitGains I was the Chief Medical Officer of a biotech company that was on the rocks. Two directors & the CEO bought lots of shares. The company went bankrupt. There is danger of drinking too much of one's own coolaid

x.com/i/article/2061…

SpaceX is about to be the largest IPO in human history. But here’s the catch… It’s also going to be the trade most retail investors REGRET for the next 5 years. Here’s why, and the 4 space stocks I’m actually paying attention to instead: On June 12, SpaceX will list on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. The expected valuation is around $1.75 trillion. That’s more than twice the previous record IPO, and more than the GDP of all but a handful of countries on earth. But even if SpaceX doubles from there, your return is 100%. In the same window, a small cap space stock with the right setup can do 5x or 10x. The math simply does not work for retail investors hoping for asymmetric returns from a trillion dollar IPO. You are buying a fully priced, fully discovered, fully institutional name on day one. The real money in space is not SpaceX. It’s in the smaller, less-followed public names that will get revalued the moment SpaceX trades. Here are the 4 I am watching: VELO Velo3D 3D prints metal parts inside SpaceX's Raptor engines. SpaceX backed them early and was their first customer. The cleanest direct supplier name on the public market. RDW Redwire Space The picks and shovels of space infrastructure. Solar arrays, deployable structures, microgravity manufacturing. The stuff every satellite and spacecraft needs. BKSY BlackSky Real-time earth observation satellites with major defense and intelligence customer base. Sub-billion-dollar market cap with a Pentagon backlog. GHM Graham Corporation Rocket turbopumps through its Barber-Nichols subsidiary. Already supplies multiple US launch players. Nobody is pricing the space exposure inside this name. Most of these sit between $1 billion and $4 billion market cap. Meaning even if they 5x to 10x from here, they would still be relatively small businesses. That’s the power of an asymmetric bet. Either it goes to zero, or it does 5x to 10x over the next few years. At The Assembly, we are a team of 8 with one goal: help you find the right stocks early. Turn notifications on so you don’t miss our alerts. This is EXTREMELY important. If you are not following us yet, you will understand later why that was a mistake.

Investors have never used this much leverage: US margin debt surged +$83 billion in April, to a record $1.3 trillion. Over the last 12 months, margin debt has risen +$453 billion, or +53%. As a result, margin debt is up to a record 5.2% of US GDP. This is ~3 percentage points above both the pre-2008 Financial Crisis level and well above the 2000 Dot-Com Bubble peak. Market leverage is through the roof.

🚨 EVERY MAJOR S&P 500 CRASH WAS PRECEDED BY A MACD PEAK Just look at the chart: 2000 top: MACD peaked at ~100 -> index dropped -49.60% 2008 top: MACD peaked at ~75 -> index dropped -57.69% 2026: MACD is sitting at 496 The peaks that caused 50% crashes don't even register on the same scale as where we are right now Every single time this indicator turned from elevated levels - major crash followed Current reading is 5x higher than anything that preceded a major crash in 30 years of data I don't know exactly when it turns. But when it does, there's no historical reference for what follows Position accordingly!

Pepesso @0xPepesso

2 months ago

🚨 WARREN BUFFETT WENT ALL IN SELLING His sell-to-buy ratio just hit 15:1 This happened only twice in history: Dot-com Bubble crash in 2000 and AI Bubble right now $397,000,000,000 idle in cash Buffett Indicator at 227% vs 88% historical average This man definitely knows

83 239 1K 778K 558

@KobeissiLetter this is @HenrikZeberg blow off top

@TriggerTrades So many people impersonating you.

This is what the world fears most.✨ The technicals are screaming. A long-term trendline drawn from the late 1970s has guided oil prices for nearly five decades. Now, after years of volatile consolidation, that line is being tested once again. The chart is forming a pressure cooker pattern: a classic ascending trendline with a massive horizontal resistance zone sitting dead ahead at $120. Trump and his team understand the catastrophic consequences if that level is breached and held. That’s why the desperation is so visible the propaganda, the spin, the frantic efforts to suppress prices. This oil chart doesn’t just look bullish. It looks like a volcano on the verge of eruption. One spark ..a sunk tanker, a major refinery outage, a serious geopolitical escalation and the lid blows off. $120 will be taken out violently, and the next measured target sits near $220–$240 with terrifying speed. The pressure is building. The warning signs are impossible to ignore. The globe is watching… and bracing. De-escalation is paramount. Otherwise, it’s a gusher. Yours truly, The Great Martis✨

The US Dollar continues to lose market share: The US Dollar now represents ~46% of global FX and gold reserves, the lowest in at least 26 years. This percentage has declined -15 points since 2017. Excluding gold, the US Dollar makes up 57% of global reserve currencies, the lowest since 1994, according to IMF data. This comes as central banks have aggressively accumulated gold and diversified into other currencies. The last time the US Dollar fell below 50% of global reserves was in 1990-1991, a period marked by elevated inflation, a recession, and a crisis of confidence in the US economy. What is happening here?

All time highs. Uhoh.