Slate Money - Credit Cockroaches
Slate Money
Slate Podcasts
4.1 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 October 2025
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week: The downfall of First Brands and Tricolor has led to finger-pointing between banks and private credit firms. Felix Salmon, Elizabeth Spiers, and Emily Peck discuss whether these fraud-related bankruptcies are a sign of major issues to come within the credit market. Then, car prices and sales are up across the board. The hosts cover the state of the auto industry, the spike in EV sales caused by expiring incentives, and what it’s like to own a Crybertruck these days. And finally, QQQ is probably the only ETF you’ve heard of thanks to its aggressive advertising. The hosts explain the unusual structure of the wildly successful ETF that led to a Super Bowl ad level marketing budget but very little profit for its own trustee Invesco.
In the Slate Plus episode: What the heck is going on with matcha prices??
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Podcast production by Jessamine Molli and Cheyna Roth.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. |
| 0:19.2 | I'm Felix Ammon of Bloomberg. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios. |
| 0:23.6 | Hello, hello. With Elizabeth Spires of the New York Times. |
| 0:27.7 | Hello. And we are going to finally give you the private credit bubble episode that you've been |
| 0:32.7 | waiting for. You've been writing in and being like, talk about first brands. So now we are |
| 0:37.0 | going to talk about first brands, the credit market and whether things are bursting. |
| 0:41.9 | We are also going to talk about cockroaches. |
| 0:44.0 | Yes, that's the same subject. |
| 0:45.8 | We are going to talk about cars, which are very expensive. |
| 0:49.0 | I'm going to talk about why they're so expensive and what's going on in the auto market. |
| 0:52.6 | We are going to talk about QQQ, the NASDAQ, |
| 0:58.7 | ETF, that is just insanely profitable. |
| 1:03.0 | We have a slate plus segment on matcha. |
| 1:07.4 | It's all coming up on slate money. |
| 1:12.1 | Okay, so let's start this week with honestly the subject that most listeners have been requesting, which is, when are you going to talk about first brands? |
| 1:22.3 | When are you going to talk about private credit? |
| 1:24.0 | Is there a bubble? |
| 1:24.9 | Is it bursting? |
| 1:26.1 | I'm just going to come out and say there probably |
| 1:28.7 | is a bubble and it probably isn't bursting, at least not yet. This is where I'm at on this one. |
| 1:35.3 | The big picture is that we are in a world historically frothy moment for credit, for lending money to people. If you look at the bond market, which as |
| 1:47.2 | Slate Money listeners know is the most important market in the world, the amount that companies |
... |
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