Tom Bilyeu

But in the fall of 24, they started getting significantly less than a dollar for their dollar's worth of local currency.

They were being asked to pay a premium because dollars were hard to find.

And it has only tightened further since the war began.

Analysts who were paying attention flagged this back in 2024, but nobody listened.

It's at that edge of being just complicated enough that most people never map this out.

But it controls so much of your life and the impact on your portfolio.

Unfortunately, we all have to wrap our heads around this.

The oil shock did not create a fragile system.

it collided with a system that was already fragile due to the increasing systemic risk growing inside of the private credit market.

I did a full deep dive on exactly what's causing that increasing risk, and you can watch it right here.

When you combine an already fragile system with a sudden massive spike in dollar demand, the feedback loop accelerates fast.

Falling commodity prices signal stress, falling currencies signal stress, and stress signals are exactly what convince banks to pull back further, which causes more stress signals, which causes more pullback, and the problem becomes a runaway train.

Now here's the part of the 2008 parallel that gives me heart palpitations.

In 2008, the system got hit cold.

The banks were overextended, but at least they had been operating in conditions of relative stability right up until the big stressor hit.

The shock was external, it was sudden, and it hit an otherwise healthy system.

This time, the system is already sick.

the private credit stress, the Euro-dollar tightening, the repo market signals, these were all alarm bells that were going off before the war began, which means even if the war is over, by the time you hear this, the system still has a growing problem of unknown magnitude.

In 2008, the question became whether the system had the tools to absorb a sudden shock.

Right now, the question is, how sick is the system exactly?