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Zeitgeist — a spike by Chris Gathercole
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Premium: The Hater's Guide To Junk

Newsletter · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-10-14)

  • The market is in an “outrageous era of crap,” characterized by an explosion of junk bonds and leveraged loans that extend beyond traditional high-yield debt, forming a “Crapverse” fueled by massive leverage.
  • The AI industry is a primary driver, with companies like Anthropic and OpenAI described as “single-worst businesses in the history of capitalism” (negative EBITDA, massive customer concentrations), requiring hundreds of billions in high-yield debt to fund speculative data centers.
  • Major players like Oracle are on the “last rung of investment-grade debt” due to significant credit risk exposure to OpenAI (which makes up roughly half of Oracle’s $638 billion in RPO).
  • This confluence of the “AI data center bubble” and “SaaSpocalypse” is creating a setup where private credit and other investors are poised to lose billions from “some of the worst deals in history” if these highly leveraged, low-credit ventures fail.