“We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen.”

Only halfway through January and already the outlook for 2024 looks incredibly binary for credit risk. One could easily determine that potential sources of idiosyncratic risk are accumulating — be it company or sector-specific debt worries, global geopolitical flashpoints, or the good old US election trail. But there is also scope for systemic risk to hit everything — should central banks provoke a market tantrum, or geopolitical flashpoints escalate into all-out war.