Is the US financial system more fragile than it looks?

US financial system fragility, private credit, Treasury basis trade, Japan’s BOJ and Bitcoin—Neil Woodford explains what could break next (and what probably won’t).

Jon and Neil stress-test the popular “2007 again?” narrative and separate market panic from actual plumbing risks. Neil pushes back on the idea that today’s private credit story is a straight replay of subprime, arguing the parallels are overstated and that most of the market is conventional longer-term lending.

We also cover:

💰 Leverage and market structure: where genuine fragility might sit if funding conditions tighten, and why leverage concentrated in financial-market plumbing matters more than headline doom narratives.  

🇯🇵 Japan as the “quiet character”: why rising JGB yields and the yen carry trade may be less of a structural threat than many assume.  

₿ Crypto systemic risk vs bad investment: MicroStrategy, stablecoins, and why Neil differentiates between an ugly trade and a system-wide destabiliser.