The private-credit default rate rose to 9.2% in 2025, up from 8.1% in 2024 and the highest ever for a full year.

U.S. bank loans to non-depository financial institutions that include private credit reached $1.2 trillion as of mid-last year. That was nearly triple the share from a decade ago.

Breit’s assets under management went from over $68 billion at the end of the fourth quarter of 2022 to about $54 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to Blackstone quarterly reports. Bcred, meanwhile, grew from under $59 billion to almost $90 billion. Combined with other similar private funds for other asset classes, their collective growth far more than offset Breit’s decline in size.

Last year, a record 6% of workers in 401(k) plans took a hardship withdrawal. That is up from 4.8% in 2024 and a prepandemic average of about 2%. The median withdrawal was $1,900.

Chicago took the top spot in a ranking of U.S. cities by financial distress. Chicago saw a 30% increase in residents allowed to skip payments due to financial difficulty, and it also ranked near the top for the number of distressed accounts per capita. Houston, Las Vegas, Dallas and Los Angeles rounded out the top five.

While the S&P 500 has traded within a range of just 2.7% in 2026, the average company in the index has moved within a band that is about seven times as much. That ratio is the largest since at least 1994, signaling a market with unusually high divergence in returns between different companies.

Companies in the State Street Software ETF trade at roughly 19 times their next 12 months of earnings, down from a peak of more than 47 times in 2022. Companies in the broad S&P 500, meanwhile, are trading at close to 22 times forward earnings.

Shares of many large private-asset managers peaked around late 2024 or early 2025, following a long surge. Now, after recent sharp price drops, those firms’ shares are each down by at least 30% since the start of 2025.

In 2008, banks originated around 60% of mortgages and serviced about 95% of mortgage balances. As of 2023, banks originated 35% of mortgages and serviced 45% of mortgage balances.

The U.S. produced only 1.2 million jobs in 2024, versus the previously estimated 2 million. The labor market slowed even more to add just 181,000 jobs last year, versus the previously estimated 584,000.