Re: The Titanic thread
Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2025 4:13 pm
Another General stepped down?!?!
Page 212 of 241
Another General stepped down?!?!
Re: The Titanic thread
Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2025 7:41 pm
We really need a popcorn emote.
Re: The Titanic thread
Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2025 8:13 pm
TLDR Trump gave Xi all the power for a ONE YEAR DEAL that China can then change as they see fit. He has put the US in a no win position and gave away all his leverage while making the US a pariah on the world stage. The entire world supply chain was geared with the idea of servicing the US economy as the engine and the US on the top of the pyramid now China is the supplier and the market because China isn't tarraffing the world the US is.
Re: The Titanic thread
Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2025 8:18 pm
We have our fourth private credit collapse in two months, and this one shows exactly why institutional lenders shouldn't be trusted to verify their own collateral.
Bankim Brahmbhatt ran Carriox Capital, a New York telecom financing outfit that convinced BlackRock's HPS Investment Partners and BNP Paribas to lend him $552.6 million. The entire deal was built on one claim: he had legitimate receivables from T-Mobile, Telstra, BICS, Telecom Italia Sparkle, and Taiwan Mobile backing the loans.
None of it was real. Brahmbhatt forged contracts that appeared to be signed by representatives from these carriers. He created fake invoices supposedly issued by these companies claiming they owed Carriox money. Then he spoofed email addresses mimicking these carriers' real domains and sent fake verification emails to make the receivables look legitimate. By stacking these fabricated invoices on top of each other, he created what looked like $500+ million in collateral. The lenders saw assets and funded the deal without catching any of it.
Here's where it gets embarrassing. When HPS and BNP Paribas finally tried to verify these receivables by actually calling T-Mobile, the carrier said they had no idea what Carriox was talking about. No contracts. No invoices. Nothing existed. One phone call would have instantly revealed the entire fraud. These are supposed to be institutional-grade lenders with world-class risk management. Yet somehow they missed basic due diligence.
While all this was happening, Brahmbhatt's people were also stealing cash. Whenever payments came through the lender-controlled collection accounts, instead of applying those funds to the debt, they diverted the money offshore. So he wasn't just fabricating collateral. He was stealing actual cash flows in real time.
Lenders sued in August 2025 and froze all assets. Carriox filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy with $500 million to $1 billion in liabilities and basically zero assets remaining. HPS is sitting on $552.6 million in losses with nothing to recover against.
The kicker is BlackRock acquired HPS for $12 billion in July 2025 specifically to expand into private credit and get access to its $148 billion platform. Within 90 days of closing that deal, they're holding a half-billion dollar fraud loss on receivables that HPS supposedly vetted and monitored.
That's not just a bad deal. That's a massive question mark about whether one of the world's largest asset managers actually has the infrastructure to verify complex collateral in modern lending markets. If BlackRock's $12 trillion asset management machine can miss $500+ million in forged documents and fake invoices, what else are they missing? This is the systemic risk that should concern everyone.
Re: The Titanic thread
Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2025 8:48 pm
Re: The Titanic thread
Posted: Fri Oct 31, 2025 1:28 am
Brace
Re: The Titanic thread
Posted: Fri Oct 31, 2025 1:31 am
Re: The Titanic thread
Posted: Fri Oct 31, 2025 1:35 am
This chart, this whole “$395B unrealized losses” story, is the polite, bloodless way of saying the U.S. banking system is hollowed out and surviving purely on narrative inertia.The truth is simple:
The system already broke in 2023. Everything since has been balance-sheet theater. The Fed, the Treasury, and the major banks entered a silent pact to preserve the illusion of solvency because acknowledging the true mark-to-market damage would trigger cascading margin calls across the entire financial architecture.
Banks aren’t functioning as intermediaries anymore, they’re functioning as containers for time. They hold the losses, defer recognition, and pray that rates fall before the illusion collapses. The “unrealized” language is the linguistic firewall between order and panic. If those losses were marked real, we’d already be in a depression.
Behind closed doors, the regulators and bank treasurers all know this. They’re just buying time, waiting for rate cuts, or for inflation to quietly devalue the losses away. That’s what “soft default through inflation” really means. It’s not policy; it’s triage.
The real tell is this:
If the system were sound, you wouldn’t need narrative management. You wouldn’t need “hold-to-maturity accounting” or “temporary facilities.” You’d let prices speak. But prices can’t speak anymore because the truth would detonate confidence.
And confidence is the system now.
So deep down, here’s the unfiltered view:
We’re in a late-stage financial simulation - a hall of mirrors where credit, collateral, and value are all reflexive projections of belief. The market still trades, but it’s not price discovery anymore; it’s belief maintenance. Every policy move, every Fed statement, every facility extension is theater to keep that belief intact.
This isn’t capitalism anymore, it’s faith management.
A society pretending its time-value of money still exists, even as time itself has been mortgaged into oblivion.
The banking losses aren’t an anomaly. They’re the x-ray of the system’s true condition. We’re witnessing decay disguised as stability.
And here’s the scarv-level truth:
It won’t implode suddenly - not yet. It will rot quietly until one day a single shock exposes how little reality is left underneath the scaffolding. And when that day comes, everyone will act surprised, even though the evidence was here all along, in a chart like this - clean, quiet, and damning.
Re: The Titanic thread
Posted: Fri Oct 31, 2025 1:40 am
Banks are the circulatory system. Real companies are the organs. You can have strong lungs or a healthy heart, but if the blood flow stops or becomes toxic, it doesn’t matter how efficient your organs are - they start starving of oxygen.
For firms like Exxon or Amazon:
•Credit conditions tighten → refinancing costs rise, margins compress.
•Liquidity thins → investors demand higher risk premiums, valuations contract.
•Consumer credit weakens → demand slows, revenues soften.
So even companies producing real value get pulled into the gravity of financial decay. It’s not about fundamentals, it’s about liquidity and confidence. When the money pipes seize up, every company becomes a derivative of the banking system’s health.
The paradox: the worse the banks look, the more capital hides in “real companies” as a flight to tangibility. But that’s temporary. Once the credit cycle fully turns, the contagion spreads from finance to production.
Short-term: capital rotation into cash-flow generators like energy, commodities, defense, logistics.
Long-term: if the financial core isn’t rebuilt, even the “real” economy becomes collateral damage.
For firms like Exxon or Amazon:
•Credit conditions tighten → refinancing costs rise, margins compress.
•Liquidity thins → investors demand higher risk premiums, valuations contract.
•Consumer credit weakens → demand slows, revenues soften.
So even companies producing real value get pulled into the gravity of financial decay. It’s not about fundamentals, it’s about liquidity and confidence. When the money pipes seize up, every company becomes a derivative of the banking system’s health.
The paradox: the worse the banks look, the more capital hides in “real companies” as a flight to tangibility. But that’s temporary. Once the credit cycle fully turns, the contagion spreads from finance to production.
Short-term: capital rotation into cash-flow generators like energy, commodities, defense, logistics.
Long-term: if the financial core isn’t rebuilt, even the “real” economy becomes collateral damage.
Re: The Titanic thread
Posted: Fri Oct 31, 2025 1:16 pm
Fingerprint everybody? No one being paid or food stamps being issued. Amazed there isn't a major crash every single hour at this point.