Cloud 9fin

El Niño is back, and *Cloud 9fin’*s LatAm and CEEMEA editors see credit risks spreading across energy, agriculture and sovereign balance sheets.
Deputy LevFin Editor Sasha Padbidri speaks with LatAm Editor Xochitl Herrera and CEEMEA Editor Dan Alderson on how worsening weather shocks are feeding into leveraged credit and emerging market risk.
In Colombia, drought could cut hydropower output just as gas production falls, forcing more imports while Canacol works through a Canadian restructuring process. Xochitl also flags Mexico’s exposure to Henry Hub through gas imports, Chilean utilities’ hydropower upside, and Brazil’s soybean and corn vulnerability.
Dan breaks down Africa’s uneven El Niño effects, from Southern African drought to East African flooding, against a backdrop of food, fuel and fertilizer disruption.
Here’s a summary of the 9fin articles mentioned in the podcast:
Africa vs Godzilla El Niño — Key battle lines for credit in 2026/27
Colombia braces for perfect storm as El Niño looms over gas crisis
FEMSA, KOF and Alsea may benefit from El Niño effect
El Niño could lift Chile utilities, but less than last time
Brazil climate whiplash could put key credits to the test
Houston, we have a solution — How space data centers could be debt's next frontier
Hurricane Helene hits southeastern US borrowers
Hurricane Beryl shakes up Texas borrowers
$98bn in AI projects disrupted by mounting environmental and labor risks
Resistance is fertile — Iran war’s impact on agriculture and CPI
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When an announcement was made last year that Universal Studios was making a movie about Archie Andrews produced by Hollywood heavyweights, it should have been a victory for one of comics’ most enduring franchises. Instead, it triggered a legal war which ties up a Beverly Hills mansion, accusations of threats fit for an “organized crime figure” and a much-awaited movie on the line.
With a UCC foreclosure auction set for June 15, the fate of Archie Andrews — and the Archie Comics empire — hangs in the balance.
In this episode, 9fin’s global head of distressed and LevFin, Max Frumes, sat down with distressed debt reporter Maria Heeter and LME legal analyst Laurie Tomassian, co-authors of a recent investigation into the dispute between lender Raven Capital and Archie Comics co-CEO Jonathan Goldwater to break down how it all unraveled.
As a quick shoutout, the episode references and includes short audio clips from the 1969 hit 'Sugar, Sugar' by the fictional bubblegum-pop group, The Archies. The song held the #1 spot on the Billboard Top 100 for eight weeks between October and December 1969. The episode theme song is a tongue-in-cheek homage to The Archies’ second studio album, Everything’s Archie, created bespoke for this episode by our producer Chase Collum.
Clarifications: There's actually no show called “Desperate Mormon Housewives. Instead the popular reality television series was called "The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives". Also, while Archie Comics did once don the wrappers of Topps bubble gum, that was in the 1950s, and the host was almost certainly referring to Bazooka Joe.

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Bitcoin Depot went from a $600m, publicly-traded business to bankrupt in a matter of months, but the story around the company and other crypto ATM providers has been brewing for years. We happen to have just the guy on staff to break it all down.
In this episode of Cloud 9fin, head of bankruptcy Cat Corey talks with senior LevFin reporter Dan Mika about his previous reporting on the crypto ATM industry’s history of targeting neighborhoods of color, and how it has become a favorite tool for organized scam groups to separate victims from their cash. The two also talk about what value is left for creditors in a business model where — in the eyes of lawmakers — the societal harm is too great to ignore.
Have any questions? Send us a note at podcast@9fin.com. Thanks for listening!
Stories referenced in this pod:
- High-fee crypto ATMs center around low-income parts of Kansas City
- How Crypto ATMs in the U.S. Became A Favorite Tool for Scammers
- FBI Internet Crime Report 2025

In our latest episode of Syndication Nation, leveraged finance reporter Sunny Oh sits down with Mark Melchiorre, chief investment officer of Forza Investment Group, to discuss how insurance-focused asset managers are helping to finance America’s new “Manhattan Project” — the rapid buildout of tech and AI-driven digital infrastructure.
Melchiorre discusses his journey through credit markets and the appeal of hybrid capital in a world of growing dispersion. He also talks about the prospects for small modular nuclear reactors, which have garnered interest as power proves to be a key bottleneck in the race to develop new data centers.
Check out coverage on leveraged finance and private credit at 9fin.com.
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It seems that over the past few months, you could sum up the troubles facing private credit with one word: ‘illiquidity.’ This is a key tenet of the asset class, and it is often cited among the reasons for private credit’s premium. But it also can pose challenges, as seen through record redemption requests from non-traded BDCs and the dilemma of managing the tail end of a fund’s life.
Two paths to manage those challenges are to raise more money and engage in secondary transactions. So, who better to ask about this moment in private credit than Campbell Lutyen’s global head of private credit Jeffrey Griffiths, whose team leads private credit fundraising and secondaries advisory.
In this episode of Cloud 9fin’s Private Chat series, reporter Tom Quinn checks in with Griffiths to learn about the state of the fundraising market and how secondary transactions are taking shape.
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