The war after the aid
American support for Ukraine has moved from a commitment to a negotiation. The consequences are mechanical, and they arrive on a schedule that is easy to read in advance.
Iran War
Escalation ladders, proxy networks, energy chokepoints and the limits of pressure.
All Iran WarThe escalation ladder nobody controls
Every participant in the Iran file believes it can calibrate. The structure of the confrontation rewards that belief and then punishes it.
Sanctions, oil and the limits of pressure
Maximum pressure has a well-documented failure mode: it changes who buys the oil, not whether it is sold.
China Vs Taiwan
Coercion below the threshold of war, and the chokepoints that make it global.
All China Vs TaiwanThe quarantine scenario
The most likely coercion of Taiwan is not an invasion. It is a law enforcement operation that the world has no agreed way to answer.
The semiconductor chokepoint is also a financial one
Onshoring the fabs does not onshore the packaging, the substrates or the chemicals. The dependency map is longer than the headline.
Private Credit
Direct lending: valuation, liquidity, and marks that never have to face a market.
All Private CreditWho lends to the lenders
Direct lending funds are described as unlevered vehicles making senior loans. The leverage sits one level up, and it is where banks re-entered the business they left.
Private credit's mark-to-model problem
An asset class that grew up in a decade of falling defaults is now being tested on the one thing it never had to prove: how it prices a loan that is going wrong.
Private Equity
The exit drought, the fee engine, and what happens to assets held past their plan.
All Private EquityThe fee engine outlived the returns
Private equity's economics were built on carried interest. They increasingly run on management fees, and the two point managers in different directions.
In a take-private, the leverage arrives after the headline
The premium paid for a public company is announced. The debt loaded onto it afterwards is not, and it is the part that decides what happens next.
The exit drought and the distribution machine
Private equity's problem is not the value of what it owns. It is that it has to sell it to someone, and the someone has stopped appearing.
The AI capital cycle and how it is financed
The technology may be transformative and the financing structure may still be unsound. These are separate questions and they are constantly conflated.
What breaks first in an AI correction
The order matters more than the timing, and the order is fairly predictable.
Real Estate Crash
Housing: a market that will not clear, and the costs deciding who can buy at all.
All Real Estate CrashWhen the data centre becomes the next office tower
Purpose-built property financed against a single tenant and a single use has a specific failure mode, and commercial real estate has run it before.
The multifamily hangover nobody puts on the front page
Apartment buildings bought with floating-rate debt and a rent growth assumption are the quietest large problem in commercial property.
Builder incentives are the price cut nobody counts
New home prices look stable because the discount is being paid through the mortgage rate instead of the sticker.
The bid that left crypto
Every crypto cycle ends the same way: not with a verdict on the technology, but with the quiet disappearance of the marginal buyer.
Stablecoins are money funds with a different rulebook
A dollar token is a promise to redeem at par, backed by a portfolio. Every risk that structure carries has a long and well-documented history.
The Everything Bubble
When every asset is priced off the same discount rate, diversification stops being a defence.
All The Everything BubbleEverything is one trade now
Assets that look unrelated are increasingly priced off the same variable, which means diversification is doing less than the portfolio says it is.
The wealth effect is the transmission belt
Asset prices reach the real economy through the spending of the households that own them, and that ownership is more concentrated than the aggregate suggests.