Only a court can decide if the actions are fraud, but they sure look like it to me. Fraud doesn't excuse the lack of due diligence.

That's true, but only to a point. Due diligence is not uncommon, especially with more traditional forms of credit.

I resorted to the mortgage-lending analogy so others could quickly grok what multi-pledging means.

My understanding is that many private credit funds have been very lax about conducting basic due diligence on the creditworthiness of borrowers.

For example, take First Brands, a multi-billion-dollar company which filed for bankruptcy last year. First Brands had pledged the same assets as collateral for loans from multiple private-credit funds. Those loans were being carried at a fantasy NAV of 100 cents per dollar, until suddenly they were not. Did none of these lenders submit UCC filings so other lenders could check which assets had already been pledged as collateral? Did none of these lenders ever check to see which assets had already been pledged? Did all these lenders make loans based on blind trust?

Failing to check and verify that assets have not been pledged as collateral to other lenders is an amateur mistake. It's reckless, really. The equivalent in home-mortgage lending would for a mortgage lender never even bothering to check that a homeowner isn't getting multiple first-lien mortgages simultaneously on the same home, then forgetting to put the first lien on the property title.

My take is that for many private credit funds, NAVs are basically fantasy.

Trouble has been brewing in private credit for quite a while, but lenders and investors have been reluctant to write anything down, resorting to all kinds of "extend and pretend" games to avoid write-downs.

tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock...