The Domino Effect Begins: Jamie Dimon’s Cockroach Warning Coming To Fruition
Jamie Dimon’s recent warning that when you see one cockroach, there are probably more is now playing out almost line for line. First came Tricolor Holdings, a subprime auto lender that collapsed under the weight of bad loans and alleged fraud. Then First Brands, a heavily indebted auto parts manufacturer, filed for Chapter 11. Now, PrimaLend Capital Partners, another subprime lender has fallen after defaulting on its bond payments, pushed into bankruptcy by unpaid creditors.
These aren’t isolated blowups; they’re the first visible cracks in a broader credit contraction that’s been quietly building beneath the surface. What links them all is the same structure of fragility: loans to high risk borrowers, funded through short term credit and securitized into complex bonds that depend on constant refinancing. When the Fed held rates near zero, that model worked but after two years of policy tightening and an average fed funds rate above 4.4%, the entire subprime ecosystem is choking on its own leverage.
The subprime auto sector is the perfect early warning signal because it sits at the intersection of consumer stress and financial engineering. Borrowers with weaker credit are defaulting at rising rates, repossessions are spiking, and lenders like PrimaLend that rely on bond markets for funding are discovering those markets have no appetite for risk. This is about a chain reaction through the private credit and asset backed markets that financed them.
Dimon’s cockroaches aren’t just in subprime auto, they’re spread across the shadow banking system. Many private credit funds, BDCs, and securitized lenders hold similar exposure, marked to model rather than market. The first failures are surfacing where consumers feel the pinch first, but as liquidity tightens further, the stress will migrate up the credit spectrum, from auto loans to small business credit, to leveraged corporates, and eventually to the banks that lent to them.
These bankruptcies are the financial equivalent of the first tremors before an earthquake. What looks contained in subprime auto today is really the credit cycle shifting into its next phase, one where overextended lenders, not just borrowers, start defaulting. The cockroaches are moving fast, and the lights have only just come on.