Residual-Claim Absorption and Credit Bridging: The Uptake Gap as an Upstream State of Crisis Vulnerability

Modern macro‑financial crises are triggered by diverse events yet display a recurring morphology: leverage rises in expansions, vulnerabilities accumulate, and tightening or risk repricing propagates nonlinearly into contractions and crisis‑style clearing. This paper proposes an upstream macro‑finance state object—the Residual‑Claim Absorption Structure (RCAS) —to describe how equity‑like residual claims on future cash flows are institutionally allocated and absorbed across sectoral balance sheets. The central inversion is that credit aggregates measure the amount of intertemporal “credit bridging, ” but not why bridging becomes the marginal clearing mechanism. RCAS shifts attention upstream: when broad, high‑MPC balance sheets absorb relatively little capitalization‑layer upside in a non‑levered manner, sustaining transaction scale increasingly relies on credit bridging (balance‑sheet expansion that pulls future resources into present settlement). The primitive institutional margin is grant‑based distribution (θgrant), defined as an audit‑executable, version‑bound mapping from transaction facts to residual‑claim settlement objects. Because θgrant is rarely observable cross‑country, the paper measures RCAS via realized projections: the uptake gap (gₕold), a leverage‑adjusted uptake gap (gA) isolating net‑worth‑funded absorption, and levered‑buy‑in intensity (LBI) as a negative‑control channel. A falsifiable signature map and a shock‑family identification design (with an explicit admissibility gate and comparability ledgers) discipline interpretation. This work is not investment advice and does not argue that households should buy equities