“He must have killed off an awful lot of patients to have made all that money.”

Kill or cure feels like the theme of the moment, and grave prognoses abound in various parts of the financial world that it is the cure that is killing the patient. Economically, “the sick man of Europe” has made the rounds once again as every armchair MD tries to diagnose the UK’s list of economic ailments. And in leveraged finance specifically, the steroidal intervention of private credit has become addictive, but more and more people are starting to question what happens when the delivery system falters.

We’ve been here before of course. Specifically with the UK we witnessed economic and political anguish reach a crescendo in September/October and infect the whole financial network around it. While it’s clear we are not yet back at that level of hysteria, a number of metrics are heading back in that direction — from gilt yields and the cost of sovereign CDS protection, to the deemed repayability (or otherwise) of residential mortgages.