Some financial defaults are negotiated. Many are silently embedded in the systems we are all party to — contracts nobody signed but everyone bears terms under.
The Unpriced names and prices these transfers: who provides the financing, who captures it, what the actual numbers look like, and what would change them. Each investigation follows the same template — name the instrument precisely, compute the exposure, surface the asymmetry, propose the levers.
Investigations
One investigation per piece. The next ones — credit-card grace periods, security deposits, withholding overcollection, gift-card breakage, 401(k) match cliffs — are in the queue.
Methodology covers every FRED series we pull, every editorial constant in the model, the downstream allocation of float between employer and government withholding, and the empirical gaps we are honest about.
Sources index and about page are forthcoming.