The Money is Getting Worse
In January, I wrote that the money was getting weird and it rhymed with 2008. It's two months later and what the actual f*ck.
In January, I wrote that the money was getting weird. Private equity firms sitting on $3.7 trillion in unsold companies, selling them to themselves through “continuation funds,” and I said it rhymed with 2008.
I was being generous.
Two months later, the United States is at war with Iran and oil hit $126 a barrel and the national debt has crossed $39 trillion and the Strait of Hormuz is functionally closed.
And that’s just the war.
There’s a lot of noise in the world right now, and I’m going to take a moment to break from my regular content to share the five things I’m seeing happening simultaneously. Not because any one of them is unprecedented, but because all five hitting at the same time is.
1. Your customer has less money and more fear
Consumer sentiment dropped to 55.5 in March. 29% of Americans now have more credit card debt than emergency savings. Macy’s posted -0.5% same-store sales while Ross Stores is up 9% and Five Below is tracking for a 12.9% increase.
The consumer is trading down. Not in the abstract “consumers are cautious” sense that gets said in every earnings call. In the specific, measurable sense that wealthier households are now shopping at Walmart — Doug McMillon said it on their earnings call — and discretionary categories are getting cut first.
If your 2026 plan assumed a stable or recovering consumer, your plan is wrong. Not pessimistic-wrong. Structurally wrong. The consumer who existed when you wrote that plan in October doesn’t exist anymore.
2. The companies you sell to, partner with, and work for are financially fragile
The PE situation I wrote about in January got worse. Fast.
Since then: Saks Fifth Avenue, Forever 21, Pat McGrath Labs, Eddie Bauer. 1,400+ store closures announced for 2026 so far. PE-backed companies now account for 71% of the largest consumer discretionary bankruptcies, up from 65% when I wrote the January piece.
Two months. Six percentage points.
The. actual. f*ck.
But here’s the part that didn’t exist in January: the $265 billion private credit meltdown. The shadow banking system that funded the PE buyout wave is seizing up. Apollo down 41% from peak. Blackstone down 46%. KKR down 48%. Blue Owl down 66%. Blackstone had to inject $400 million of its own capital into one of its credit funds to stop investors from running for the exits.
This is how the PE problem becomes your problem. They can’t exit. They can’t refinance — not with $1.35 trillion in corporate debt maturing this year. So they squeeze the companies they own. Marketing budgets get chopped. Agency retainers get canceled. Headcount freezes, then layoffs.
And then there are the zombie brands. PE-backed companies that are essentially insolvent but still spending aggressively on customer acquisition, trying to show growth before a restructuring that everyone in the room knows is coming. You’re competing for the same customer against a brand that is lighting investor money on fire. That’s not a competitive landscape. That’s a burning building with a sale sign in the window.
3. Your team is getting smaller. The people being laid off are your customers.
108,435 layoffs were announced in January 2026 alone. The highest January total since 2009. Hiring plans are down 63% year over year.
Meta is cutting 20% company-wide. Fifteen thousand people out the door while committing $135 billion to AI infrastructure. Amazon cut 16,000 in January. UPS is replacing 30,000 jobs with automation. DOGE has eliminated 242,000 federal positions, ten percent of the civilian workforce. For the year to date, 12,304 layoffs have been directly attributed to AI replacement.
The professional-managerial class being laid off is the exact demographic that premium B2C and B2B brands target. And the people still employed? They’re not switching jobs, not taking risks, not spending with confidence.
4. The market is pretending everything is fine
Ad spend forecasts (the ones published before the war) were actually up. Madison and Wall boosted their 2026 US forecast to 10.2% growth. Magna projected global ad revenue hitting $979 billion.
Those forecasts were written in a different world than you and I are living in, dear reader.
The reality: 42% of marketers now anticipate lower budgets in 2026, up from 22% last year. WARC cut $19.8 billion from global ad spend forecasts. Three months before the 2003 Iraq War, 98% of advertisers felt confident they’d hit their sales targets. By the time the war started, 82.5% expected to miss.
That pattern is repeating. The money isn’t disappearing evenly. It’s consolidating into channels with defensible ROI and draining from everything else. If your channel can’t prove its math to a nervous CFO in a single slide, your channel is at risk.
5. Remember what Anthony Bourdain taught you about CDOs?
In 2008, the transmission mechanism that turned a housing problem into a global financial crisis was the CDO — opaque, illiquid, supposedly diversified instruments that turned out to be concentrated in the same correlated risk. Nobody knew what was in them until it was too late. The rhyme scheme is getting uncomfortably precise.
In 2026, the equivalent is private credit. A $1.8 to $2.1 trillion market with the same features: opacity, illiquidity, and extreme sector concentration. Default rates have climbed to 5.8%, the highest level ever tracked. And they’re building Private Credit CLOs on top of this. Leverage on leverage.
The war didn’t create this fragility — it detonated it. The Gulf sovereign wealth funds that were the most reliable funding source for private credit now need emergency liquidity at home. The Strait of Hormuz closure cratered their oil export revenue. S&P Global flagged $307 billion in potential deposit flight from GCC banks. They can’t sell their illiquid positions without fire-sale losses. Trapped on both sides.
And here’s the part that connects this to your customer’s kitchen table: Blackstone, Apollo, and Ares have been pushing private markets into 401(k) portfolios — targeting the $13 trillion in American retirement accounts. If retail investors start to perceive that their retirement savings are trapped in the same gated, illiquid structures, the resulting panic won’t stay in the financial pages.
This is where I’ll leave you, for now
None of these things, in isolation, would be unprecedented. We’ve had wars. We’ve had debt crises. We’ve had layoff waves. We’ve had tariff regimes.
We haven’t had all of them at the same time, hitting the same consumer, the same supply chain, and the same budget simultaneously. Each one makes the others worse. The war drives oil prices up, which drives consumer costs up, which drives sentiment down, which drives spending down, which drives budgets down, which drives layoffs, which drives spending down further. It’s a loop. And it’s tightening.
This isn’t just a recession. The last recession was a cycle — things contract, things recover, the line goes back up. This is more a structural shift. The system that’s been propped up since 2008 with cheap money, cheap debt, cheap labor, and cheap attention is running out of props. And instead of fixing the foundation, the people with the most to lose broke the last load-bearing wall and blamed it on the machines.
I’m a millennial. This is my fourth major economic crisis before 40. Every time my generation starts to get our footing, the floor drops again. At a certain point you stop calling it bad luck and start calling it what it is: a system that was never built for us to win.
Putting that aside, though, the best case scenario right now, the most optimistic credible forecast I can find, is a “brief growth recession” followed by a rebound. That’s the good version. That’s the version where everything goes right.
No ad budget is going to fix what’s happening right now. No marketing strategy is going to paper over $126 oil and 108,000 layoffs and a tightening credit market. I’m not going to insult you with a five-point action plan.
What I’m doing — with my own hands, my own money, my own time — is building. Tools. Infrastructure. Things I own and control, because the systems we’ve been renting from platforms and vendors are about to get repriced, gated, or killed.
I’m learning things that scare me. Sitting with code I don’t fully understand, breaking things, building them back wrong, because the gap between what I can do now and what I’ll need to do in 8 months is not closeable by watching webinars.
I’m watching the same playbook run everywhere: companies cutting the teams that build and keeping the teams that report, optimizing for a consumer who no longer exists, and holding still and hoping the ground stops moving.
Spoiler: It doesn’t stop.
Every crisis leaves a crater. The 2008 crash left one in consumer trust, and those who filled it (Warby Parker, Shopify, Stripe) didn’t wait for the old market to come back. They built in the wreckage while everyone else was refreshing their 401(k) balance.
I don’t know what the crater looks like this time. But I’d rather be the one with a shovel than the one still arguing about why the ground moved.
