The downgrade notice ran to nineteen pages and landed on a Saturday, which is how you know it was serious. Corbin Vance Ratings has cut the entire US household inheritance market to junk. The trigger was a measurable rise in parents asking total strangers whether to rewrite the will.
Advice columns are now the short-term funding market for family wealth. MarketWatch this week ran a letter from a couple weighing a $3 million estate against a son who stopped speaking to them. In credit terms, that is a covenant breach with no cure period.
"Every family estate is a leveraged bet that these people still take each other's calls in twenty years," said the firm's head of relative coverage. "We no longer treat that collateral as money-good."
The rhyme with 2007 is hard to miss. Back then nobody priced the correlation between mortgages. Nobody today prices the correlation between Thanksgiving dinners. When a whole country stops picking up at once, the tranches go down together.
Corbin Vance has put nineteen million estates on negative watch. The screen is simple. Any bequest is flagged the moment the beneficiaries mute the family group chat.
