Tom Bilyeu

Trade wars, tariff escalations,

invasions, military strikes, deposed regimes, a serious global contest over the future of the dollar as the world's reserve currency.

The entire architecture of the post-war economic order is under pressure from every direction all at once.

And layered on top of it is the arrival of AI, which is disrupting job markets, rewriting business models, and creating a level of uncertainty in the workforce that we haven't seen in at least a generation.

You put all of that together and what you get is a market environment that has become incredibly skittish, fragile,

and reactive.

The kind of environment where bad news travels fast and a contagion spreads even faster.

And that instability is putting direct pressure on exactly the kinds of companies that have borrowed heavily through the private credit market.

Midsize firms running on tight margins in an economy that is squeezing them from every direction.

The question is, how far down is the economy going to go?

Will the pressure dismantle the private credit markets entirely?

And is private credit now big enough that its failure could trigger a global event like 2008?

Let's look at the visible cracks that are erupting as we speak.

Last September, a company called First Brands Group, a major auto parts supplier backed by private credit, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Creditors alleged the company had borrowed against the same invoices multiple times, using what court filings described as off-balance sheet financing to hide how leveraged it actually was.

The Department of Justice opened a criminal investigation.

Total unpaid loans were up to $2.3 billion.

Weeks later, Tricolor Holdings, a subprime auto lender also funded through private credit, collapsed.

Regulators had previously cited them for selling cars they didn't even have the titles to and lending to borrowers without credit scores or even a driver's license.

JP Morgan wrote off $170 million on that one.