Troubling signs in corporate debt

Summary

---

Unhedged – "Troubling signs in corporate debt"

Date: September 25, 2025
Hosts: Katie Martin & Rob Armstrong
Produced by: Financial Times & Pushkin Industries

---

Episode Overview

In this episode, Katie Martin and Rob Armstrong discuss the alarming signals emerging in the corporate debt market. Spurred by recent collapses and distress among lesser-known companies like First Brands and Tricolor Holdings, the hosts dissect what these events could imply for broader credit markets, investment risk, and the balance between public and private credit. The conversation weaves through technical explanations, market psychology, and the potential for wider contagion.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Scene: Corporate Debt Wobbles

• [00:39] Katie notes that despite corporate debt’s popularity, cracks are appearing, citing First Brands (car parts supplier, headed for bankruptcy) and Tricolor Holdings (subprime auto lender in trouble).

  • “...has the corporate debt market overheated?”
    — Katie Martin [00:52]

• Both examples appear sudden, given each company’s recent perceived health.

---

2. The Companies at the Center

First Brands: The Roll-Up Gone Wrong

• [03:41] Rob explains First Brands as a classic "roll up"—a company that grows via acquisitions, funded by cheap debt.
  • Such companies “either make the owners very rich... or they borrow $1 too much... and they blow up in a blaze of glory. And…First Brands seems solidly in the fly off the rails category.”
    — Rob Armstrong [04:32]

Tricolor Holdings: Subprime Stress and Social Risk

• [04:55] Katie and Rob describe Tricolor’s model—subprime car dealer counting on selling cars + making loans to customers, many of whom are immigrants without Social Security numbers.
  • Recent pressure from immigration crackdowns hit this sector hard, increasing default risk.
  • “...this was the first good sized business that has really looked like it’s gone into bankruptcy and Slash is failing.”
    — Rob Armstrong [06:49]

---

3. Are These Canaries in the Coal Mine?

• [07:15] Katie points out, “It feels a little bit like a canary in a coal mine. It’s something that—”

  • Rob jokes: “Two canaries.”
  • Lighter banter on collective nouns for canaries (“an opera of canaries!”—[22:33]).

• The hosts stress that one-off blowups sometimes precede bigger market problems, referencing 2006-07’s mortgage market.

---

4. The Mechanics of Corporate Bond Risk

Collapsing Spreads Signal Overheating

• [08:17] Katie details spreads between corporate and government bonds, noting the risk premium for lending to companies has shrunk to historic lows.

  • “...those spreads have just vanished...no one has seen [these levels] for decades and decades.” — Katie Martin [08:51]

• Rob provides specifics:

  • “As recently as three years ago, you got about 6% more...now we have hit 2.7...the spread has been cut by more than half, which is like the stock market doubling in a way.” — Rob Armstrong [09:22]

Market Positioning and Herd Risk

• [09:51] Katie shares Bank of America survey results: 59% of investors are "overweight" credit.
  • “...that basically means correction risks are rising.” — Katie Martin [10:17]

---

5. Isolating the Issues: Idiosyncratic or Systemic?

Tricolor: Unique or a Harbinger?

• Rob: “There is a way you could write off Tricolor as anomalous...a company that catered to a very specific audience that the President...is trying to throw out of the country.” [11:19]

First Brands: Private Credit, Hidden Leverage, and Lack of Transparency

• [11:45] Rob highlights the "fancy" asset class of private credit, and the danger of opaque borrowing.

  • Lenders were unaware of each other’s exposure, leading to collective surprise at the company’s massive debt load ($6bn in syndicated loans, $4bn in private working capital loans).

• [14:38] Katie points out the difference between public bond visibility and private lending opacity: “When it’s all public bonds, it’s very easy to tell...if it’s private…”

• Historical parallel: “...one after the other...you write this one off...but it builds up just like it built up in 2006, 2007.” — Katie Martin [14:59]

Why This Time Might Be Different

• Katie: Private credit has absorbed much of the riskiest lending—banks and public markets are less exposed.

• Rob: Explains why private lenders are less systemically dangerous than banks:

  • Lower leverage (50/50 vs. 10:1 for banks)
  • More stable funding (long-term vs. banks’ fickle deposits) — Rob Armstrong [17:26]

• Katie and Rob agree private credit can restructure quietly, reducing panic.

  • “We can extend and pretend...” — Katie Martin [17:42]

---

6. European Perspective: French Government Bonds’ Role Reversal

• [17:51] Katie highlights that French corporates now borrow more cheaply than the government—a historic market inversion.

  • “This is a strange reversal...upside down world.” — Katie Martin [18:18]

• Rob relates it to US history, saying IBM bonds once yielded less than Treasuries in the 1970s' chaos.

• Katie notes it's rare and signals real market anxiety over French political risk.

---

7. Big Picture: Correction or Crisis?

• [19:43] Rob’s take: “Credit too expensive? Are corporate debt markets too happy for their own good? I think they are.”

  • He anticipates more mini-crises but does not foresee a systemic meltdown as in 2008 or the Eurozone debt crisis. — Rob Armstrong [20:30]

• Katie: Correction possible even without new news, as investors could get spooked and take profits.

  • “It just wouldn’t take too much to push this market over.” — Katie Martin [20:30]

---

8. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• [07:15] "It feels a little bit like a canary in a coal mine." — Katie Martin
• [09:22] “As recently as three years ago ... now we have hit 2.7 ... like the stock market doubling in a way.” — Rob Armstrong
• [14:59] "And you write this one off as an esoteric story and you write that one off as an idiosyncratic shock, but it builds up...just like it built up in 2006, 2007..." — Katie Martin
• [17:42] "We can extend and pretend..." — Katie Martin, on private credit's flexible approach to restructuring.
• [22:33] [Fun Fact] "When you see a bunch of canaries, you do not see a flock ... You see an aria or an opera." — Rob Armstrong, via soundman Jake

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:39: Show intro; news of First Brands and Tricolor unraveling
• 03:41: Explanation of First Brands and "roll up" business model
• 04:55: Explaining Tricolor’s business and market pressures
• 08:17: Dive into bond market spreads and investor risk premium
• 09:51: Investor positioning and risk of correction
• 11:45: Private credit’s role; transparency and hidden leverage
• 17:51: French bonds trading weaker than French corporates
• 19:43: Hosts’ final thoughts on correction vs. systemic crisis
• 22:33: “Opera of canaries”—collective noun fun fact

---

Tone & Style

The hosts maintain a casual, witty, and deeply knowledgeable tone, weaving technical explanations with market anecdotes, gentle ribbing, and lively market banter.

---

Takeaways

• Recent corporate wobbles (First Brands, Tricolor) raise red flags about the health and transparency of credit markets.
• Market risk premia on corporate bonds are unusually low—historic signals often preceding correction.
• Private credit markets, while a buffer against systemic collapse, still carry pockets of opacity and risk.
• European bond markets are sending troubling signals of government instability.
• Hosts suspect more trouble ahead in credit, but not a full-blown systemic crisis—unless complacency persists.

---

For anyone interested in what’s brewing in corporate debt, this episode is an accessible yet deep dive into the cracks appearing in the market and what to watch for next.

Transcript

[PJIM Announcer]

If bonds are back today, why wait for tomorrow? At pjum, our fixed income strategies help investors uncover hidden value and unlock opportunities. Whether you're looking to enhance your income or diversify your portfolio, our broad range of strategies bring together local expertise and deep credit research to help you achieve your long term goals. PJUM Our investments shape tomorrow today.

[Rob Armstrong]

Pushkin.

[Katie Martin]

Corporate debt is hot right now, so it's a little alarming to see some cracks starting to form. One of the cracks is in First Brands, which is a car part supplier. I've never heard of it either, but it's been feasting on private money from lenders and now it looks like it's heading into bankruptcy. Another is Tricolor Holdings. Again, not exactly a household name, but it's a subprime auto lender that has run itself into a sticky patch. This all makes you wonder, has the corporate debt market overheated? This is Unhedged, the Markets and Finance podcast from the Financial Times and Pushkin. I'm Katie Martin, a markets columnist at the FT in London, but I'm actually in New York this week. Hooray. Giving an address to the un no. Hanging out with the big fella, Rob Armstrong from the Unhedged Newsletter, the daily newsletter for discerning market's dorks. Rob, my first question.

[Rob Armstrong]

It's great to have you tease me face to face, Katie. That's the point. I was getting tired of being mocked from 3,000 miles away.

[Katie Martin]

Tell me, why is it so hot here? It's very, very hot.

[Rob Armstrong]

It's very hot. September is still summer in New York and it is still humid. I hope you didn't pack a sweater or as you would say, a jumper because you will not need it here in New York City in September.

[Katie Martin]

I didn't pack a jumper, but I did pack a suit to wear at an event tomorrow, which I think I'm.

[Rob Armstrong]

Gonna be wearing a suit tonight and I'm gonna be sweating. Oh, but Katie, I'm gonna be looking good.

[Katie Martin]

You reckon?

[Rob Armstrong]

Yeah.

[Katie Martin]

Now listen, Rob, it is never good when the top of the FT homepage has big stories about credit going wrong. Allow me to tell you what's in the current story at the top of our homepage from our colleague Eric Platt and also Robert Smith in London. US Debt investors have raised the alarm over lax lending standards in credit markets after the unraveling of two companies that just two weeks ago were deemed to be in strong health.

[Rob Armstrong]

And as as all discerning problem solving connoisseurs in markets. No, the credit market is where the Bad stuff always happens.

[Katie Martin]

Always happens. So let me just carry on from this story. So I'm paraphrasing a little, but Tricolor holdings at the start of this month appears to have failed, and First Brands Group is looking at bankruptcy proceedings. The thing is, Tricolor had a triple A rating when it borrowed in credit markets very recently. Basically, the people who examine who's borrowing what under what terms say, yep, this is a very solid company.

[Rob Armstrong]

Really solid.

[Katie Martin]

Super solid. First Brands seems to have amassed as much as $10 billion in debt and off balance sheet financing. Yikes. And it almost raised some more last month. So let's start with First Brands. Okay, what the hell is First Brands?

[Rob Armstrong]

Okay, First Brands is a very simple thing. It is a company that produces car parts, which is a very normal, real economy thing to do. It is also, it is worth noting, what we call a roll up in our world, which means it started out making just one or two kinds of car parts, but then it got a hold of some financing to buy other car parts. So I can't remember what exactly was, but maybe it was spark plugs, and then it went to windshield wipers, and then it went to catalytic converters or whatever it is. In general, rollups end in one of two ways. Either they make the owners very rich because they become these very powerful horizontally integrated businesses that dominate their industry, or they borrow $1 too much or more often more dollars than that, and they blow up in a blaze of glory. And, like, they kind of get addicted to buying other companies and borrowing money and growing inorganically and they kind of fly off the rails. And this company, First Brands, seems solidly in the fly off the rails category.

[Katie Martin]

Yeah, yeah. Whereas, like, Tricolor is a very different sort of business.

[Rob Armstrong]

Right.

[Katie Martin]

And this is interesting in other ways. So again, it's not exactly a household name, particularly outside of the States. But as I understand it, it lends money for people with low credit ratings, like generally low income people, to buy cars.

[Rob Armstrong]

Yeah, it actually sells the cars, too.

[Katie Martin]

Yeah.

[Rob Armstrong]

So it has used car lots under its own name and other names and it sells you the car. But like a lot of car dealerships, they actually don't make their real money on the car. They make their money on the loan they sell you to buy the car with. And not only were these. Not only did Tricolor specialize in low credit ratings, it specialized explicitly in borrowers who didn't have Social Security numbers. And that means immigrants in America, unless you live in New York City, you have to have a car. So if you are an Immigrant documented or on Social Security number or green card or. No, you need a vehicle to get to work.

[Katie Martin]

Right.

[Rob Armstrong]

And this company specialized in lending money to those people. And for a long time they were pretty good pays. And that went along fine. But this stopped going along fine for.

[Katie Martin]

Reasons that are pretty obvious. Right. A lot of these people have stopped going to work.

[Rob Armstrong]

Yeah.

[Katie Martin]

Or they don't want to get rounded up by immigration officials.

[Rob Armstrong]

Yeah. Or maybe they've just left the country and what happened to their car that they bought while they were here was not top of their list of concerns. So it sort of makes sense. And we have heard some kind of minor sounds from other businesses that the immigration crackdown was causing some pressure from certain consumer brands or so forth. But this, as far as I know, was the first good sized business that has really looked like it's gone into bankruptcy and Slash is failing.

[Katie Martin]

So I spent my morning in New York, like doing a couple of meetings with, you know, people I've been meaning to catch up with for quite a long time. And they were pointing to both of these examples and saying, look, there isn't necessarily a straight line between these two things, but this just is a little. It feels a little bit like a canary in a coal mine. It's something that.

[Rob Armstrong]

Two canaries.

[Katie Martin]

Two canaries.

[Rob Armstrong]

What is the. You know how like animals have the. Have like a collective noun, like a murder of crows.

[Katie Martin]

Is it not just a flock of flock of canary?

[Rob Armstrong]

No, I think it's something more colorful like how.

[Katie Martin]

It's a parliament of crows.

[Rob Armstrong]

Exactly. Precisely.

[Katie Martin]

Anyway, multiple canaries that people in markets are keeping an eye on just in case this is the flock. First start of stress in the credit markets because we spend a lot of time on this show talking about stock markets because people understand stocks pretty well.

[Rob Armstrong]

Yes.

[Katie Martin]

They go up, they go down. Simples. Credit markets are a little bit more complicated than that and forever. When people have talked about corporate bonds, they've talked about what the gap is between the yield you get on a corporate bond and the yield you get on government bonds. So what kind of return do you get on those two types of bonds.

[Rob Armstrong]

For the extra risk you're taking of lending to a company rather than the government, which has the printing press. So we'll definitely pay you back, at least in nominal dollars.

[Katie Martin]

Yes. So in theory, you as an investor should be getting paid a lot more money to take corporate risk than you do to take government risk. Because as you say, governments can always pay you back because they can print the money if they really, really have to. But what's happened, particularly over the past couple of years, those spreads have just vanished. Like you get paid almost nothing more to lend to a company, particularly a safe company in what you call investment grade markets. But even to a large extent in high yield markets, which is also known as the junk bond market, which is riskier companies, that gap, that extra dollop of cash that you get, has just shrunk to levels that no one has seen for decades and decades.

[Rob Armstrong]

Okay, here is the bank of America ICE US High Yield Index spread, which is a kind of a big generalization about how much interest extra you get paid for lending to quite a risky company. And as recently as three years ago, you got about 6% more.

[Katie Martin]

6 percentage points more.

[Rob Armstrong]

6 percentage points more. So that's okay. That's a lot like. So for a five year corporate bond versus the five year treasury, you're getting an extra 6%. Now we have hit 2.7. So the spread has been cut by more than half, which is like the stock market doubling in a way.

[Katie Martin]

Yes.

[Rob Armstrong]

You know, and so huge move. And if you bought those bonds back in the summer or early autumn of 2022, you've made a bundle of money.

[Katie Martin]

You've made a bundle of money now. So I'll tell you something else from bank of America. It's funny you should bring that up because they do a survey of credit investors and in the credit investor survey they put out the other day, they said, quote, a mammoth 59% of investors are now overweight credit, which means they're holding more credit in their portfolios, more corporate debt in their portfolios than they normally would. And they said that basically means correction, risks are rising. So when everything is priced so richly and everybody's in corporate bonds, it wouldn't take very much to make a lot of investors turn around and say, hmm, is this a good idea? Or should I take the profits that I've made over the past couple of years, which have been brilliant, and should I just pack up and go home? That's why little things like funny little esoteric problems in subprime auto lenders and funny little financial problems that windscreen maker manufacturer type people that have been big borrowers in debt markets, those are the sorts of things that make investors say, hmm, is this a canary?

[Rob Armstrong]

Okay, in the case of tricolor, and there has been something of a debate in the US Office about the correct pronunciation of this name, is it the very American tricolor or the more European or Latin flavored Tricolor?

[Katie Martin]

Tricolor.

[Rob Armstrong]

Anyway, if you are a Credit investor. There is a way you could write off Tricolor as anomalous and not reflective of broader markets. It is a company that catered to a very specific audience that the President of the United States is trying to throw out of the country. Yes, this sounds like a one off.

[Katie Martin]

This sounds like idiosyncratic risk.

[Rob Armstrong]

Now with First Brands, I think the situation is a little bit more complicated. And it's complicated in part because as you suggested at the beginning of the show, it's tied up with the new darling asset class of all Wall street private credit. I think a big part of the problem, as far as I can tell at First Brands was that not all of the lenders knew what the other lenders were lending. Oh, right. So lenders may have thought they had a full picture of the capital structure of this company and it turned out they did not. Now, whether that is due to carelessness, deception, poor planning or whatever, at this point we can only speculate. Yeah, but there's two big chunks of lending here and now we're going to get a tiny bit technical. So everyone put on your thinking cap. The first big chunk of lending to First Brands and its car parts was quite standard corporate syndicated lending, which means this is general money for you to run your company. I am going to lend it to you, then I'm going to take the notes or like your obligations and I'm going to securitize them and sell them into a semi public loan market.

[Katie Martin]

And what sort of companies do that? Is it private equity firms?

[Rob Armstrong]

No, no, no. This is like something that operating companies do. Like if you're a credit card company, you take all the credit card receivables. That means your debt and my debt, and you chop them up into little pieces and you put them into the market in a bond like a cdo, a collateralized debt obligation. And this is totally standard behavior now. So they're lending money to First Brands, they're chopping up the debts, they're selling them into the loan market. All very normal, however. So that's about $6 billion. However, there was another $4 billion of debt rattling around inside this company. And that debt was debt that First Brands took against its working capital. So like many companies do, they said, look, we've sold to a supplier, they haven't paid us yet. Lend us money against that receivable. Right, we'll get the money later. You give us the money now, we'll pay you and we get paid. Alternatively, they were borrowing money to pay their suppliers. So they were doing the Opposite on the supplier end. Anyway, it turns out they went a bit bananas, as you British people would say, with the amount of working capital lending they were doing. So There was another $4 billion provided by private lenders. So that's the fancy. And so. But maybe the people in the standard loan market didn't know what the private lenders were doing. And then there was a moment of realization when everybody realized this company has a lot more debt than we thought.

[Katie Martin]

So when it's all public bonds, it's very easy to tell, right? Because you know, it's across all of your data screens. Here's a company issuing a bond if it's private.

[Rob Armstrong]

And even the loans, the loan market which these guys played in, it's sort of semi public, semi private. You can't just whip up the numbers on Bloomberg, but you can look loan by loan inside the bond.

[Katie Martin]

Yeah, right. I think we talked about this on the show the other week when you have lots of flaky little borrowers and lenders suddenly getting into trouble just one after the other. And you write this one off as an esoteric story and you write that one off as an idiosyncratic shock, but it builds up just like it built up in 2006, 2007, when there were lots of companies that were making mortgages to people who couldn't afford them and they started falling over one after another. And all of them were just sort of brushed off by the market saying, ah, yeah, but that was a special situation. Ah, yeah, but this one was bailed out by those guys, so it didn't matter. And then one day it became too much to bear. Why I think this time is different, to use a cursed phrase, is that actually the private credit markets have been a really good shock absorber for credit globally. So they've taken on a lot of the companies that banks wouldn't lend to or that the big public bond markets wouldn't lend to, so they've taken out that riskier part of the market. So that's one of the reasons why investment grade bond markets and high yield bond markets, all the kind of standard bit of the bond market for companies, has been very well behaved and in fact has squeezed those spreads lower is because all the risky stuff has gone somewhere else.

[Rob Armstrong]

And let me add something about this, and again, I'm going to get slightly technical here. So again I have to ask listeners to on their thinking caps a little bit. But there is different. There's important differences between a bank lending a company money and a private credit company. A private Lender lending a company money. Here are the two key differences. One, the bank deals with a lot more borrowed money. So the bank is levered like eight or 10 times, meaning for every dollar they lend out, they've got 20 cents of real money in the bank. At a standard private credit lender, it's 50, 50. So that makes it less dangerous right there. The second thing is banks fund with deposits which can go out the door very quickly. And the problem where you get with banks is when all the deposits leave on some random Tuesday and you've still got all these loans and you blow up. The funding of a private credit company tends to be longer term. Yes, these are genuine differences between banks and private credit that help and are.

[Katie Martin]

Good in private credit as well. When a company gets into trouble, the lender can say, okay, you've got yourself in trouble here. Why don't we restructure your debt? You don't need to make a big announcement about it. Not everyone needs to know. We can extend and pretend and we.

[Rob Armstrong]

Can have that discussion without the incredible crushing pressure of public markets trying to drink your blood out of your skull.

[PJIM Announcer]

Exactly.

[Katie Martin]

One little wrinkle to kind of throw in at the end of this is over. In Europe, Obviously, French government bonds have been under a lot of pressure lately because France is being France and having one of the political. I was gonna say shit show. I think I'm gonna stick with shit show. Yeah, it's having one of the shit shows that it has.

[Rob Armstrong]

I'll say that in France. Le presentation. Merde.

[Katie Martin]

That'S the one. And so French government bonds have been weakening a lot to the point where actually a lot of French corporate bonds are more expensive than the government bonds. And this is a strange reversal. This is like upside down world. It's not supposed to be the case that companies can borrow more cheaply than the government in which they're domiciled.

[Rob Armstrong]

Now, I said this either in the newsletter or on this podcast before, and listeners readers wrote in to say this has happened in the United States before. Like in the 70s when it was cats and dogs living together in the United States and inflation was out of control and Jimmy Carter was there, IBM bonds had a lower yield than the equivalent US Government bonds. So it has happened before, but it was the 70s when you couldn't park on the street because someone would steal your car every single time.

[Katie Martin]

But it's extremely rare. And it's one of the things that's happening in European markets at the moment that is really making people think, oh, hang on, the French government is really in a spot of bother here. Yes, my core expectation of the French government is it will do what it always does, come up with some hodgepodge solution and things will be fine, but there will be some drama along the way. So what do you reckon? All told? Is credit too expensive? Are corporate debt markets too happy for their own good?

[Rob Armstrong]

I think they are. I think a huge amount of money has rushed into the credit market very quickly and when that happens, credit quality goes down. So I don't think these two companies are idiosyncratic. I do think we'll see more of this, especially if the US economy continues to gently slow down, which it has been doing. But to pick up on your point, I don't see a systemic mess coming out of that. This because of the points you made about how the structure of the credit market. I mean we may get a systemic mess for some other reason, but I think the risk of a repeat of the systemic mess of not only 2008 but kind of Eurozone crises type things of a few years after that seems pretty low at this point.

[Katie Martin]

Yeah, I think low. But I also think it just wouldn't take too much to push this market over. And I think you might end up with a bit of a correction that's not necessarily based on, on a piece of news but just based on a bit of a wave of nerves that runs through the market. And some people who've made good profits say you know what, maybe I'm tapping.

[Rob Armstrong]

Out here and that's okay. You know, you, and indeed you might want to say if you are a long term investor, a little of that would be healthy. Yeah, right. You know, if this, if we keep going like we have been going, we are going to get the massive forest fire. But a little brush fire might be okay at this point.

[Katie Martin]

Regular listeners may ask themselves why Rob doesn't have a similar conversation with himself about stock markets. But listeners, how worried are you? Let us know unhedged t.com we will be back in just 1sec with long short.

[PJIM Expert]

In 1960-2000 we saw GDP per capita, roughly speaking income per person measure the standard of living. It grew at an average annual rate of 2.3%, which means the standard of living doubles every 29 years. That's one working career in the 21st century. GDP per capita risen at an average annual rate of 1.3%, which means the Standard of Living is doubling every 56 years. And there is a palpable sense of reduced opportunity for today's young.

[Rob Armstrong]

Hear more expert insights on investing with PJIM's the Outthinking Investor Podcast.

[PJIM Expert]

Subscribe today.

[Katie Martin]

Okie doke. It is time for Long Short. That part of the show where we go long a thing we love or short a thing we hate. Rob, what you got?

[Rob Armstrong]

I have just been informed by our brilliant sound man Jake of the collective noun for a canary. And it is the best collective noun I have ever, ever heard in my life. Yeah, when you see a bunch of canaries, you do not see a flock.

[Katie Martin]

You see an aria or an opera. Jake.

[Rob Armstrong]

Incredible.

[Katie Martin]

An opera of canary.

[Rob Armstrong]

That's perfect. If you've ever been around a canary. I mean, this is their. They are. They are like preening little opera singers and they're dressed up and it's just perfect. I'll tell you what though, I'm long.

[Katie Martin]

Those words, I'm willing to bet all the money I have in the world that Jake googled that and did not know it off the top the of.

[Rob Armstrong]

Yes, that's a safe bet.

[Katie Martin]

So that's cheating. Okay, I am short. Well, I'm long and short, but I think I'm short of going out drinking with Robert Armstrong, which is a possibility for Thursday night. I've got an early flight to catch on Friday, so it's all a bit upside down this week. We're recording this on Wednesday. The podcast is going out on Thursday. By the time this podcast goes out, I probably will be drinking with Robert Armstrong. This is the point of greatest danger to my life. So we should all hope that it goes smoothly. Pray for me listeners, we will be back in your ears on Tuesday. If we survive until then. So listen up then. Unhedged is produced by Jake Harper and edited by Bryant Urstadt. Our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein. Topher4hairs is the FT's acting co head of Audio. Special thanks to Laura Clarke, Alistair Mackey, Greta Cohn and Natalie Sadler. FT Premium subscribers can get the Unhedged newsletter for free. A 30 day free trial is available to everyone else. Just go to ft.com unhedgedoffer I'm Katie Martin. Thanks for listening. Sam.