Financiers seem unable to resist fauna metaphors when describing the trouble stored up on company balance-sheets. When Tricolor Holdings and First Brands, two auto-industry companies, declared bankruptcy in October, Jamie Dimon, boss of JPMorgan Chase, likened the situation to a “cockroach”—where there is one bad loan, there are probably more. In February, after Blue Owl was forced to ban capital withdrawals from a private-credit fund amid an onslaught of redemption requests from retail investors, Mohamed El-Erian, an investor, pondered whether the lender’s troubles were a dead coal-mine canary or something worse—like termites, indicating deep structural problems.
