The Grand Game III: Liquidity, Basis, Crowding, and Reflexivity

The plumbing that decides who survives when narratives break.

What this note is for

This is the “underground” layer: funding, collateral, balance-sheet capacity, positioning, forced flows.

In stress periods, markets do not price “fundamentals.” They price constraints.

1) Liquidity is a constraint, not a mood

Liquidity = the ability to transact and fund posit…