New Delhi, March 19 -- Every financial crisis has a moment, usually identified only in retrospect, when an obscure product intended to mitigate risk spreads through what author Rick Bookstaber called "tightly coupled" interconnections to cause widespread damage. The first sign is lots of hard-to-understand stories that seem unrelated, except that they all involve a single sector.

Think of all the stories in 2006 and early 2007 about subprime mortgages, underwriting fraud and various other technical-sounding events that seemed far removed from the real US economy and retail investors-until they weren't.

Starting late last year and accelerating in 2026, private credit has been the subject of lots of stories [in the US] about complicated p...