create an image of a wrecking ball heading towards a bank

Regional Banks on the Brink? Real Assets Like Gold Could Be Your Only Safe Bet

Frank Balm Nov 21, 25

Frank’s Take: The House of Cards is Swaying

I’ll say this — Laks Ganapathi may be one of the few voices in the financial world actually willing to call it like it is. Most of Wall Street is still hypnotized by AI stocks, spinning up the next dot-com bubble with glowing headlines and shiny quarterly reports. Meanwhile, the foundation of the real economy — regional banks and consumer credit — is rotting from the inside out.

She calls this “the 2008 financial crisis on steroids” — and I don’t think that’s hyperbole. It might even be an understatement.

Let’s Talk About What’s Really Going On

Look around you — what are real people experiencing?

Car loan delinquencies at record highs
Student loans coming due again with no income growth
Credit card debt hitting trillion-dollar territory
Insurance premiums skyrocketing 50–60%
Mortgage rates through the roof
And regional banks stuck holding toxic portfolios while tech stocks keep sucking all the air out of the room

It’s a slow-motion train wreck — and no amount of Fed rate cuts will fix it. As Ganapathi said: “Cutting interest rates is like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.” Amen.

Why Regional Banks Are the Dominoes to Watch

Here's the key insight: private credit markets are the hidden nuke in this system.

You've got Wall Street funnelling billions into risky “buy now, pay later” schemes and auto loan packages — all being propped up by regional banks that can’t survive another wave of defaults. When those start to collapse — and they will — you won’t just see regional failures like Silicon Valley Bank. You’ll see a cascade effect across the entire banking system, possibly even pulling down the big players with it.

And while the media distracts us with AI hype and new tech bubbles, the plumbing underneath is failing. That’s how 2008 happened, and it’s how the next collapse will happen too — only this time, the scale is bigger and the tools to fix it are fewer.

The Elephant in the Room: ISO 20022

Now, this wasn’t in the article, but it’s relevant: while the system crumbles, we’re watching ISO 20022 quietly roll out — creating a global financial communication system perfectly suited to programmable, traceable money. So even if CBDCs are officially “off the table,” the rails are being built anyway. And when the crash comes, that’s when they’ll flip the switch.

So What’s the Play? Gold. Real Assets. Period.

Ganapathi’s no gold bug, but she says what every clear-eyed investor already knows: you need to own real assets. She calls gold a solid monetary asset — and I couldn’t agree more.

Because when the banking dominoes fall — when inflation eats away your savings, and when social unrest starts bubbling over (which she predicts by 2026, and I think that’s optimistic) — it’s not going to be your stock portfolio or your online savings account that saves you.

It’ll be what you can hold in your hand.
It’ll be what’s been trusted for thousands of years.
It’ll be gold and silver.