A common tightening need not produce a common crisis. Economies can look similar in good times under conventional balance-sheet aggregates and still separate sharply under the same tightening because the stock of crisis-usable absorber strength behind those aggregates differs. This paper studies a broad class of credit-clearing crises in which tightening bites through a balance-sheet margin that must clear activity that had previously been sustained by finance. I call the relevant stock deployable net worth: the stress-usable value of economically admissible, deployable, and sufficiently unencumbered claims held in broad absorber positions, net of effective debt. The paper’s central claim is stronger than the claim that deployable net worth is useful. Over the credit-clearing domain studied here, and conditional on the remaining state, two histories are crisis-state equivalent if and only if they have the same deployable net worth. Any reduced state sufficient for future credit-clearing outcomes must therefore recover it, and any minimal sufficient reduced state is equivalent to it up to relabeling. Deployable net worth is a historically accumulated stock built through a slower upstream environment that this paper calls broad absorption: the extent to which increments in capitalized value reach broad absorber positions in economically meaningful form. Its cleanest direct-entry core is the grant share, the fraction of capitalized-value increments that end the audit window in those positions through direct, non-purchased assignment or settlement. The stock itself is the net result of historical claim cohorts entering, surviving, eroding, relocating, and being netted against effective debt. Thin deployable-net-worth paths imply more credit bridging, earlier crisis-margin entry, stronger tightening losses, thicker left tails, lower crisis thresholds, and higher crisis incidence. Representative legacy state vectors drawn from canonical macro-financial frameworks can still fail to recover crisis-state equivalence. The paper is pure theory with a diagnostic empirical interface. The theoretical object is general; what is institution-specific is the precision with which it can be measured. A benchmark auditable settlement environment developed in companion work supplies the cleanest benchmark implementation of the direct-entry margin, but the crisis theory itself does not depend on that benchmark environment.
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