It's Bigger Than You Expected?

Pulling back the curtain on private credit's seeming inability to understand its own holdings...

Clark Griswold is standing there in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, holding the bonus envelope that was supposed to justify everything…the sacrifices, the optimism, the future pool shimmering in his imagination.

He opens it, and then he just… stops. Stares. Blinks. Somewhere between disbelief and the slow realization that reality has taken a hard left turn.

Across the room, his wife Ellen sees it instantly. She reads his face before he says a word and, grasping for any version of events that isn’t catastrophic, offers that fragile lifeline, inquiring about his bonus: “It’s bigger than you expected?”

Everyone knows that it isn’t. And what makes Clark snap isn’t just that the bonus is disappointing, it’s that it’s been replaced entirely with a one-year membership to the Jelly of the Month Club, a tone-deaf “gift” that trivializes everything he’d been counting on.

In his mind, that bonus wasn’t extra money; it was already spent, already transformed into the pool he’d promised his family, already proof that all his hard work meant something. Instead, he’s handed a subscription to monthly jars of jelly, and the gap between expectation and reality is so absurd, so humiliating, that it pushes him over the edge.

That is more or less where private credit and its shareholders find themselves right now… staring at the envelope.