Free research report

Get “Big Banks Are Panicking” research report for free

The companion research report to Felix Prehn’s video, prepared by Goat Academy Research. Enter your email address and the report opens immediately.

A 14-page companion briefing to the video of the same title, with data to 13 November 2026. A year ago the biggest banks on Wall Street fought each other to lend into AI. This month ING put around $500m of data-centre loans up for auction, with OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle among the names, and Barclays began paying firms such as AIG and Chubb for credit insurance that lays off between 20% and 50% of its AI exposure. The report's argument is that banks do not run from their most profitable business for no reason, and that the smart money is leaving the AI trade through three separate doors at once. The first is the banks themselves. It explains a structured risk transfer in plain English: the bank keeps the safe-looking top slice of a loan and pushes the riskiest bottom slice out to private credit funds, insurers and pension funds, so the risk does not vanish but moves. JPMorgan holds around $29bn of data-centre loans, about 12% of its commercial property book; CoreWeave's 2031 notes trade at a yield near 16%; the European Central Bank is weighing a review of roughly €200bn of euro-area AI lending and the Bank of England is questioning its own banks. Underneath sits money going round in a circle between a small group of firms that each book record revenue. The second door is Michael Burry, the investor who called 2008, who has said to get out of Nvidia and given two reasons: how much of the company rests on one man, Jensen Huang, and Nvidia helping to finance its own customers' purchases. Nvidia is around 7% to 8% of the S&P 500, so anyone holding a normal index fund already owns it, and $2.5tn was wiped off the Nasdaq 100 in a single day this month. The third door is the bond market: America sold $25bn of 30-year bonds at 5.441%, housing is at its weakest since 2010, and the Treasury Secretary is describing a way out that runs through restraint. The report then takes apart the idea that shares return a smooth 10% a year, using a sequence of single-year returns that runs 0.6%, 12.7%, 0.5%, 15.1%, minus 0.8% and 11.8%, and shows in an illustration, not a forecast, how a $300,000 pension drawing $18,000 a year through a decade averaging about 1% falls to roughly $141,000 by age 70. It closes with a table of what could change the picture, a data room, a sources page and a pointer to one free live training. It is an educational explanation of a mechanism, not a recommendation to buy or sell anything.

Goat Academy is an online financial education institution founded by economist and former investment banker Felix Prehn.

Access the report

You will be added to Felix Prehn’s research mailing list. Unsubscribe at any time.

Your email address is stored so that Goat Academy can send you future research, and is not shared with third parties. See the Privacy Policy.

All content is educational and does not constitute financial advice. This report is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security, currency or commodity. All investments involve risk, including the loss of principal. Past performance is not indicative of future results. © Goat Academy Ltd