Codfish Johnny

TLDR: I am a recovering alcoholic with no fund, no credentials, and no lobbyist. I rebuilt myself from nothing. Then I broke into finance with no degree, no pedigree, and no permission. I parsed SEC filings for a $31.5 billion private credit fund called Cliffwater. Not because anyone asked me to. Because nobody else would. The filings are public, but they are buried in footnotes that are not indexed, not searchable, and not structured for analysis. I have been told by fund managers that nobody even attempts this. Billions of dollars in pension capital, and the people who manage money for a living do not bother to read the filings. So I read them. Every loan. Every amendment. Every semi-annual PIK disclosure. 2,330 positions. I hand-researched fifty. I found 189 loans where borrowers are paying interest with more debt instead of cash. I found over 50 loans that are not generating enough cash to service their debt at all — carried at par on the books of a fund that has never reported a losing month in 41 months. The fund's Sharpe ratio is 3.75. Bernie Madoff — who was fabricating returns and could pick any number he wanted — ran a 3.5. He got caught because the numbers were too smooth by Markopolos. The greatest quant fund in history, Renaissance Technologies, runs a five or six. Cliffwater is claiming risk-adjusted returns that would be impossible even if you insider-traded with perfect information every single time, because the volatility of the underlying markets would still prevent it. Nobody asked questions. Bloomberg confirmed 14% redemptions 48 hours after I published. S&P cut the fund's outlook to negative this week. Cash on hand fell 76% in six months. This is not an isolated fund. This is the structure. $9.4 trillion in private equity. $3.5 trillion in private credit. They all pay their own valuation agents. The valuation agents decide what the funds are worth. No valuation agent has ever been fired for saying the number was too high. The marks produce the NAV. The NAV produces the fees. The fees come from pensions. The pensions come from firefighters and teachers and nurses in Oregon and California and Illinois who will never read a private placement memorandum in their lives. Wall Street ran out of rich people. The endowments were full. The sovereign wealth funds were tapped. So they went downstream — to 401(k)s, to retirement accounts, to interval funds sold to people who have no idea what they own. 1. Direct the SEC and FSOC to examine Level 3 fair value practices across interval funds and BDCs. 2. Require that valuation agents be independent of the funds they mark. 3. State publicly that the current self-marking regime creates systemic risk. 4. Mandate position-level mark disclosure for every fund that accepts pension capital. There are two ways this ends. It breaks all at once like 2008 and we fix it. Or it rots slowly like Japan: one fund blows up, six weeks of quiet, another one, and nobody connects it for a decade while a generation of retirees gets destroyed. I am not asking anyone to take my word for it. I am asking them to read the filings. If you know someone in the administration, a regulator, or anyone on a legislative committee, please send this to them. One person learned this from a one-bedroom apartment. Your government can too. The will is what is missing.

Private credit didn't blow up because of Blue Owl or bad software loans or AI disruption. Those were SYMPTOMS. The disease is the same one I've seen 3 times in 45 years on Wall Street: Too much money, too much leverage, too little discipline, and a financial product sold as "safe" to people who didn't understand what they owned. Private credit grew to $3 trillion on a simple lie - that you could earn 9-10% yields with "semi-liquidity" on assets that have no liquid market. That's not investing. That's volatility laundering. And the Street dressed it up beautifully. "Private credit." Sounds so exclusive, so sophisticated. Illiquid loan sharking would be more accurate. And don't get me started on "private equity", another Wall Street rebrand designed to make LEVERAGED BUYOUTS sound like fine wine. They changed the name because the old one scared people. The risk didn't change. Just the marketing. Wall Street has always been brilliant at one thing: rebranding risk as exclusivity and selling it to people who don't know what they're buying. Now add oil at $113 a barrel and watch the whole thing come apart. The Strait of Hormuz is shut. The IEA is calling it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. The Fed held rates steady yesterday and the market just RIPPED AWAY expectations for even a single cut this year. Oil is the fuse. But the TNT was packed years ago. Oil above $100 means inflation stays sticky. No rate cuts. Every overleveraged borrower inside these private credit portfolios gets squeezed harder every single month. Interest coverage ratios deteriorate. Defaults tick up. Valuations get marked down. And when valuations drop, the leverage stacked on top of that leverage (the "back-leverage" that banks provide using those same loans as collateral) starts to unwind. And JPMorgan already started. They marked down software loan collateral and restricted lending to private credit funds. When the biggest bank in America pulls back, that's a SIGNAL. High-yield spreads just surged to 470 basis points. The widest in years. Credit markets are screaming what equity markets haven't fully heard yet. I've watched this exact pattern before. - Junk bonds in the '80s - Dot-com leverage in 2000 - Structured mortgage products in 2007 The product changes every time but the architecture never does: Wall Street creates something complex, sells it as safe, layers leverage on top, markets the yields to retail investors, and collects enormous fees on the way in. Then something breaks and the gates go up. The people who built the machine are fine - they already got paid. The people who bought the brochure are trapped behind locked doors. $265 billion in market cap already wiped from the major PE firms. I don't think we're close to done. And you know what? That's FANTASTIC. Perhaps we'll finally get some real price discovery. Just say no to mark to model. Holders of this fine merchandise will get the returns they deserve. The pension funds, endowments, and insurance companies that piled into this garbage should take the hit. No bailouts. NONE. This nonsense has gone on far too long and moral hazard is the predictable result. The only way to end this insanity is to let Mr. Market operate. Allow price discovery. Allow bankruptcy. No more money printing. No more crony capitalism. No more extend and pretend. Blow it all up. That is the only way. "But what about the individuals who get hurt!" Better to take the hit now and reset than continue down this road. Hyper-financialization is destroying our economy and enriching the fortunes of the few. This must stop. NOW. But I have little confidence it will. We'll get more of the same: Rule changes. Special accommodations. The inevitable big ease will come. Count on it. AND BUY GOLD

News: Joe Kent is under FBI investigation for allegedly leaking classified information, three sources tell me. I’m told the investigation pre-dates his departure.

Secret Service agents responding to the Augusta National Golf Course incident where an armed man took hostages and demanded to speak to President Reagan, Oct. 23, 1983.