The Greatest Economic Crash Ever

The “greatest economy ever,” as the king and all the king’s men (and women) keep calling it, is creating the greatest private-credit crisis ever. A crisis that is increasingly being described as something that could rapidly achieve critical mass like the Great Financial Crisis did keeps blowing up relentlessly.

Today, yet another private credit fund that holds investments in many issuers of private credit, jumped on the heap of those that have already been throttling back on how much investors can withdraw from their funds in order to prevent an account-draining rush down the sewers of corporate history.

Apollo Global Management became the latest shadow bank to cap redemptions from one its biggest private credit funds after investors tried to pull $1.6bn (£1.1bn) over the last three months, as investor worries over the $3 trillion sector grow.

That makes Apollo the 6th major company that has had to cap withdrawals from the fund this year—the others being Blackrock, Blackstone, Blue Owl, JP Morgan and Clearwater. Apollo’s shares have lost a quarter of their value since the start of the year.

Trouble for the industry began in September 2025, following the back to back bankruptcies of auto lender Tricolor and car-part maker Firstbrands….

You probably remember that temblor that ran through the market as the auto industry of today started to look like the Chrysler, GM and almost-Ford bailout boneheads of yesteryear. Concerns about AI taking megabites out of the soft behinds of software companies and about the “total decimation” of oil wells and facilities that are setting up the Persian Gulf for future Trump-Gaza-Cuba style resort development while causing raging inflation for you and me are taking down the value of companies that could be heavily impacted by those threats.

You may recall that only about a week ago I wrote that the former CEO of Vampire Squid Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfiend, said he “smells” signs of another GFC. He has a shark’s nose for that kind of dying meat, as the predator who profited most off of the last financial crisis. He knows the rigging and how to pull the ropes.

Speaking of the Great Financial Crisis, maybe that is what Team Trump is trying to say when they speak of the “greatest economy ever;” maybe they mean to say, “the greatest economic crisis ever.” Bigger than the GFC.

After all, Marc Rowan, Apollo’s chief executive, said he does not believe this problem is going to be short term!

Neither do I.

College dust up

Meanwhile, the greatest economy continues to leave young men and women just about to graduate from college in dire straits—not as dire as Hormuz, but worse off than these young men and women were a year ago. The job deterioration, which started before Trump, has now become so bad one New York Times article labels it “the grimmest job market in years.”

Granted, that only means back to the depths of the Covidcrash, but those were some major low depths we plumbed back when Trump agreed to shut down almost the entire economy on the advice of the likes of Dr. Anthony Grauci, to whom Trump awarded the bully pulpit every day for all of his last year in office while he helped to roll out the greatest vaccines ever, which he did in warp-speed (lickety-split) time with minimal human testing. That is to say, outside of the total global test they gave the vaccines as soon as possible.

Many college students are taking low-level jobs just to get work, not in the careers they trained for. Pushing mops to pay off pops or the government for its college loans which they believed would be easy to pay off with big, bold new jobs that mostly went up in smoke like dessert oil.

Treasury surprise

Here was a surprising little jolt: the US Treasury announced today the United States is insolvent! That’s not surprising as a fact. We could all see it coming for years. However, it is surprising that the Treasury would come right out and say it. Ooookaay, they didn’t quite say it, but they showed it. The word “insolvent” is Fortune Magazine’s take, based on how you’d call any corporation’s financial statements if it looked just like a scaled-down version of what the US government just presented:

That’s not hyperbole — it’s the conclusion drawn directly from the Treasury Department’s own consolidated financial statements for fiscal year 2025, released last week to near-total media silence.

In true government ineptitude, which is apparently still running strong post-DOGE,

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a disclaimer of opinion on the U.S. government’s FY 2025 financial statements—the 29th consecutive year it has been unable to determine whether the statements are fairly presented. This is primarily due to serious, ongoing financial management problems at the Department of Defense and weaknesses in accounting for interagency transactions.

In other words, the government still doesn’t know what the heck it’s got. Maybe when Peat Keg’sbreath gets done partying and pillaging every nook of the world with wars both small and tall, he can straighten out his own department and get it to start honest financial reporting. Of course, that is the kind of battle that can get a guy killed! It would take a true warrior, not a poly-sci college frat boy playing video games of War of the Worlds with the entire US military.

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