Hot Topics and Industry Trends

Market Watch: Week of September 15–21, 2026 DailyDAC’s Sentiment Score: 4.1/10 (Bearish. The Fed just hiked into a maturity wall, Treasury yields are at levels we haven’t seen since the Bush administration, and the credit cracks are getting harder to ignore.) On September 16, the FOMC (the Federal Reserve’s rate-setting committee) voted 12-0 to raise the federal funds rate (the benchmark interest rate that influences borrowing costs across the economy) a quarter point to 3.75%–4.00%–the first hike since July 2023. That alone was expected. What caught people off guard was the […]

Market Watch: Week of September 8, 2026 – September 14, 2026 DailyDAC’s Sentiment Score: 3.6/10 – Not acute, but the margin is shrinking. The macro quit cooperating. Headline CPI is back to 3.4%, diesel is up 24% in a month, and Michigan sentiment is three points from its all-time low. Any one of those is a headwind. All three, landing four days before a Fed meeting where a hike is the base case, change the arithmetic for every floating-rate borrower with a 2026–27 maturity. The 10-year touched levels last seen in 2023. WTI cleared $100. That is […]

Market Watch: Week of September 1, 2026 – September 7, 2026 DailyDAC’s Sentiment Score: 4.7/10 On the surface, the leveraged-loan market had a good week. PitchBook LCD’s August numbers show the distress ratio (the share of loans trading at steep discounts, which signals investors think the borrower might not pay them back) dropping 39 basis points (roughly four-tenths of a percentage point) to 6.50%. The payment default rate, which tracks borrowers who have actually missed payments, slipped to 0.87%. And loans overall returned 0.93% for the month, helped by a […]

Market Watch: Week of August 25, 2026 – August 31, 2026 DailyDAC’s Sentiment Score: 4.4/10 Three deals this week told the same story, and it is not subtle. Valvoline picked up $125 million of additional revolver capacity, cheaper pricing, five more years of maturity, and half a turn of covenant relief in a single amendment– and gave up nothing disclosed in return. DraftKings launched a $600 million term loan B and closed it 11 days later at $700 million, priced at SOFR plus 200. Gray Media retired $675 million of 10.5% first lien paper with $750 […]

Market Watch: Week of August 18, 2026 – August 24, 2026 DailyDAC’s Sentiment Score: 3.6/10 Not much happened in distressed credit this week. But everything happened to the price of borrowing money. The 30-year Treasury yield (essentially the government’s cost to borrow money for three decades, and the benchmark that sets the floor for almost every long-term loan in the country) hit 5.34% on Tuesday, its highest level since 2007. Treasury tried to calm things down on Wednesday by doubling its buyback program– essentially stepping into the market to buy […]

Market Watch: Week of August 11, 2026 – August 17, 2026 DailyDAC’s Sentiment Score: 4.3/10 On the surface, this was a slow week in the bankruptcy courts. But beneath the surface, the underlying economic signals were anything but calm. The big-picture economic data came in roughly where investors expected. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) (the main measure of what everyday goods and services cost) rose just 0.1% in July, and the year-over-year rate slipped to 3.4%. Wholesale prices (the Producer Price Index, or PPI) were flat. Weekly unemployment filings stayed […]

Market Watch: Week of August 4, 2026 – August 10, 2026 DailyDAC’s Sentiment Score: 4.2/10 [A note on the scale: a score of ten indicates that credit markets are fully open and few borrowers are in distress. A score of one indicates that market functioning has effectively ceased. A score of 4.2 indicates a market that continues to function, but not for all borrowers who require access to it.] Headline indices performed well. The ICE BofA high-yield spread tightened to 271 basis points from 285 at end-July, reflecting greater investor confidence. Retail investors contributed $2.76 billion to high-yield bond funds in the week ended August 5, the largest inflow since mid-April, while the payment default […]

Week of July 28, 2026 – August 3, 2026 DailyDAC’s Sentiment Score: 4.0/10 The bond market and the bankruptcy courts told two different stories this week. Let’s start with the bond market: “high yield spreads” are the extra interest that risky (“high yield” or “junk”) borrowers pay compared to the safest possible borrower, the U.S. government. That extra amount is measured in “basis points”– one basis point is 1/100th of one percent so 100 basis points equals 1%. As of July 30, that spread closed at 284 basis points (2.84%), […]

Unsealing a superseding eight-count indictment on 6/24, the DOJ has revived the ‘Financial Kingpin’ statute in its prosecution of Tricolor Founder.

Trade credit insurance protects businesses from non-payment of commercial debt by covering business-to-business (B2B) accounts receivable risk exposure.