The wheels came off when the tariffs went up

A company just entered a massive debt restructuring because of tariffs…

Superior Industries, one of the world's largest OEM suppliers of aluminum wheels for the automotive industry, announced a restructuring last week—but here’s why folks are freaking out about it:

Their lenders were so worried about tariff risk that they actually wrote a “tariff-triggered default term” into the credit documents last month. ’s data and analytics picked this up as the FIRST time this has every existed in public credit markets.

Read that again. 👆👆👆

Lenders said: “if tariffs increase higher than a certain percentage threshold, and you can’t pass those costs to your customers, we’re calling your loan.”

The domino effect is shocking:

A government policy decision in DC → triggers a contractual term in a credit deal → can kill an entire company.

📢 Issuers: Your biggest threat might not be your competition. It might be a policy tweet at 3 AM.

📢 Lenders: Are you modeling policy risk scenarios that seem “impossible” today? Superior’s lenders clearly were.

📢 Everyone else: This probably isn’t the last time we’ll see this playbook → it's critical to keep track of these terms in real-time.

P.S. Thanks to Bloomberg's Matt Levine for recently highlighting Noetica's term data from this article in his latest column. We’re huge fans!