No Margot Robbie in a bathtub today. Just a hedgehog who's been watching private credit for months and needs you to read this carefully. 🦔The biggest banks on Wall Street are launching a new tool next week to bet against private credit funds, the same $3 trillion corner of finance that quietly holds money from pension funds and retirement accounts. JPMorgan, Bank of America, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, and Goldman Sachs are working with S&P Global to launch a credit default swap index called CDX Financials, allowing investors to profit if private credit fund managers including Apollo, Ares, and Blackstone run into trouble. Credit default swaps are insurance contracts that pay out when borrowers default. Banks want protection against their own exposure. Hedge funds want to profit from a downturn. This comes as Blue Owl reported 41% redemption requests last quarter and Carlyle's fund was hit with a 15.7% redemption request this week, more than three times its normal limit. My Take I want to explain why this matters for regular people because the language around it is designed to be confusing. Private credit is a market where investment firms lend directly to companies outside the traditional banking system. Millions of Americans have indirect exposure through pension funds and 401k plans without knowing it. When those loans go bad and investors try to get their money out simultaneously, funds gate withdrawals, meaning you simply cannot access your money when you need it. What the banks are doing now is building the infrastructure to profit when that happens. Credit default swap indexes were central to the 2008 financial crisis, and that doesn't mean we're heading there again. But when the largest banks on Wall Street simultaneously decide they need protection against private credit losses, and hedge funds are lining up to bet on a collapse, people with retirement savings in these funds deserve to understand what the people on the other side of that trade are seeing. Hedgie🤗