What if dividend recaps leave portfolio companies too thin to survive a downturn?
Dividend recapitalizations that loaded portfolio companies with debt to pay sponsors leave thin equity cushions, so a downturn produces faster defaults and lower recoveries for private-credit lenders.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Dividend recapitalizations that loaded portfolio companies with debt to pay sponsors leave thin equity cushions, so a downturn produces faster defaults and lower recoveries for private-credit lenders. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ · Financial conditions ▲ · Recession signal ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.