This time, I believe the collapse will go deeper and happen faster because Dodd-Frank has decimated market makers’ ability to cushion it. Likewise, the Fed will be reluctant to bail out ridiculously priced bonds like WeWork and its many covenant-lite, unsecured brethren

( ^ from the Preview)

We’re seeing classic end-of-cycle behavior: throw caution to the wind and plunge capital into the market’s riskiest corners. This artificially-induced buying is propping up companies that would otherwise succumb to the fundamental forces arrayed against them.

His parallel of corporate debt being the new mortgage debt is absolutely fascinating. 'Huge if true'. There have been discussions on here before about similar hypotheses, but I feel like this summarizes a bunch of those ideas together. So if I understand it correctly, regular stocks and bonds are no longer yielding enough to keep all our yield-based financial products afloat (e.g. pensions), which has pushed investors into riskier and riskier territory, as that final graph shows and as startup culture (and even crypto?) confirms. If the only things that have a return on investments are Greater Fool Theory-esque things that have little to no real value, it is increasingly likely that we're talking about a row of dominoes easily toppled by one and that

[...] investors have essentially gone insane.

I also think there is an interaction effect between corporate debts/spurious VCs, student loan debt/spurious degrees and the erosion of the middle class that is entirely sidelined here. But I don't know enough about any one of those to connect those dots.