Everybody can’t be me, and in a lot of respects that’s a blessing for humanity.

Ask anyone who knew me circa 2010 and they’ll tell you one me’s plenty. Anyone who knew me circa 2014/2015 would tell you one me’s too many.

But if there were more mes penning macro-market color, you’d be subjected to fewer passages like this one, from a couple of Bloomberg journalists guilty of crimes against tropes:

The start of earnings season is exposing a potential crack in the stock market’s frothy foundation.

Foundations can’t be “frothy.” And froth doesn’t “crack.” Introducing “potential” complicates the situation immeasurably further.

I despise Matt Taibbi for a lot of reasons, most of them justifiable, a few less so, but whenever I come across accidentally bad copy, I can’t resist revisiting his famous(ly scathing) review of Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, a weighty tome with a solid claim on being the most overrated volume published this century.

In that review, Taibbi pans Friedman’s craftsmanship mercilessly, taking aim at Friedman’s legendary penchant for mixed metaphors. Taibbi lampoons, for example, a passage that finds a traveling Friedman “[buying] a Cinnabon” and “waiting to be herded” onto a train so that he can “hunt for space in the overhead bins.” “Forget the Cinnabon,” Taibbi sneers. “Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.”

I should be grateful, and also more humble. The same goes for Taibbi. If everyone could write — and if more people possessed an irreverent, acerbic wit — no one would have any reason to gravitate to people like Matt and I. And God knows a lot of what I write goes out initially with typos. When it comes to avoiding mixed metaphors, I try to be vigilant, but as a friend of my father’s once told me of stop signs when I was learning to drive, “You can’t catch ’em all.”

Anyway, if you’re having trouble visualizing a “potential crack in a frothy foundation,” don’t worry because Bloomberg tells you what it looks like: “Risky lending by some regional banks.” They meant Zions and Western Alliance, which were both burned (“singed” is probably more accurate) by the same alleged fraud. In Zions’ case, it was perpetrated on California Bank & Trust, a San Diego-based subsidiary.

The specifics of the allegations (which the defendants deny) point to another collateral shell game. Long story short, Zions claims a couple of guys bilked California Bank & Trust for $60 million through a pair of SPVs set up initially to buy distressed loans. The financing arrangement gave Zions first lien on the assets. Or not. Because according to the lawsuit, the defendants effectively replaced California Bank & Trust as the senior lender with — wait for it — themselves. Or people and “entities” who may as well have been themselves.

Zions described this in terms that conjure a vast criminal conspiracy as opposed to what it probably was: A local scam you might learn about several seasons deep into American Greed, after the producers ran out of major frauds to document. “Acting through a web of affiliated companies, the borrowers and guarantors orchestrated a scheme that enriched themselves, all while keeping the bank in the dark for years about the true status of its securities interests,” the suit reads. Through the subterfuge, CB&T was “stripp[ed] of its collateral,” which was “irretrievably lost.”

Attorneys for two of the three defendants claim none of that’s true. Or that if any part of it’s true, none of it constitutes “wrongdoing.” All claims against the men are “unfounded and misrepresent the facts,” their lawyers said, in a statement.

Zions was tipped off by another lawsuit filed against the same investor group by Western Alliance. The specifics of that alleged fraud are similar: The bank loaned a bunch of millions to buy mortgages and later discovered they never had priority claim on the collateral, according to the allegations. The original arrangement included a stipulation that a related bank account at Western Alliance maintain an average monthly balance of $2 million. As of mid-August, the borrowers were a bit short in that regard: That account held about $1,000.

Elaborating in an 8-K this week, Western Alliance said they’ve “evaluated the existing collateral and believe it covers the obligation.” The bank also mentioned two guarantees, one “limited” and one “full” from “two ultra-high net worth individuals” who’d be on the hook “under certain circumstances,” one of which is fraud.

The accused named their consortium “Cantor Group.” As you can imagine, the”real” Cantor wasn’t amused. “We have been made aware of a recent lawsuit involving an entity known as Cantor Group V, LLC,” Cantor Fitzgerald said, in a dryly annoyed statement. “[We] have no affiliation or association and are not involved in any way with the litigation.”

Although the Zions financing in question dates to 2016 and 2017, the crux of the issue seems to be the bankruptcy of a commercial real estate JV founded in 2021. According to reports, one of the partners in that venture counted the three defendants in the Zions and Western Alliance suits as major investors in a preexisting distressed property management firm. The four of them are also linked through a hodgepodge of other entities, including shared ties to a bank in Irvine.

The Irvine bank loaned $100 million to the JV founders. That bank held the deed to a Laguna Beach property Zions was supposed to have first lien on. Bankruptcy filings for the JV — which went bust in February — showed significant overlap with properties pledged to Zions, which also discovered that Western Alliance held the deed to an apartment complex pledged as collateral in the California Bank & Trust deal. Some of the properties pledged to Western Alliance, meanwhile, had apparently been foreclosed upon, unbeknownst to the bank.

This goes on and on, and it gets sillier (i.e., more self-referential) at pretty much every turn. Again: It was a collateral shell game, and while I suppose it does count as “a sweeping betrayal of trust,” as the California Bank & Trust suit bewails, I’m not sure whether to credit the “sophistication” of the alleged conspirators, as the suit put it, or, at the risk of blaming to victim, fault the lenders’ underwriting processes for failing to catch onto this charade earlier given that the details of the case are inescapably slapstick.

Whatever the case, it doesn’t seem like this is going to be a big problem for Zions nor for Western Alliance. The former reports on Monday, the latter on Wednesday. Western Alliance affirmed its guidance in the above-linked 8-K and Zions, which took a $50 million charge, said it “believes this is an isolated situation,” but will nevertheless “engage counsel to coordinate an independent review.”

The timing of these disclosures left something to be desired, although Western Alliance filed its lawsuit two months ago. The Cantor Group drama (“No relation!” Cantor Fitzgerald shouted, again) came during a week when Jamie Dimon’s “roach” warning turned the Tricolor blowup and the First Brands debacle (stories which were largely confined to the financial pages) into national news.

Dimon has an annoying, Trumpian habit of feigning concern for the potential knock-on effects of his rhetoric, only to immediately pronounce upon the very thing he says he shouldn’t hyperbolize about. The full “roach” quote from JPMorgan’s October 14 call reads, “I shouldn’t say this, but when you see one cockroach, there are probably more.” That’s a bit like Trump saying, “I won’t call them bad people, but they’re bad people.”

There’s no question that Dimon’s remark set the stage for an outsized market reaction to the disclosures from Zions and Western Alliance which, I should note, also has exposure to First Brands through a Jefferies asset management unit. Now, the market stakes for any and all news related to bad loans and fraud are much higher than they would’ve been otherwise.

I don’t think these hiccups are material in any sense, let alone in any big-picture sense. Dimon could buy Zions’ Cantor Group charge-off with his personal debit card. But as I wrote on Thursday, banking’s a confidence game. “I probably shouldn’t say this,” but embedded in all confidence games is the risk that a trivial issue self-fulfills into a mini-crisis. And wouldn’t you know it, Bloomberg’s already calling this a “mini-crisis.”