So. I am currently in my fatherland, the Chechen Republic. And here is a free consultant tip (as if they do exist).

In any city on Earth, if you want a detailed, comprehensive analysis of the local economy, you need to get into a taxi and ask, "How are things?"

I guarantee the zeitgeist you receive will be better than anything Fable 5 or Kimi K3 could muster.

In my case, the answer was: the whole city is stuck in buy now, pay later BNPL. In Russian, it is called rassrochka… instalments, usually at zero interest.

As I drive around my hometown, I see this word on every advertising billboard: cars, building materials, furniture, groceries. It has gotten to a point that not offering rassrochka now squeezes you out of the market. And of course there are no credit bureaus that record the volumes.

Now, before you assume this is a sad story from a poor region, it is not.

This is a global phenomenon with a properly sinister name. Wells Fargo economist Tim Quinlan called it "phantom debt": debt that exists, compounds, and strains households, but that no central repository monitors and no credit bureau fully sees.

How big is it?

Here is the beautiful part: nobody knows.

Now. When serious institutions disagree by a factor of two about the size of a thing, the honest conclusion is: we cannot see it, and we don't know. 

What is better studied is how it's used. In LendingTree's 2026 report: 47% of BNPL users say they paid late in the past year, up from 41% the year before, and 34% the year before that. Two consecutive years of deterioration.

29% have used instalments to buy groceries — double the share of two years ago. Among Gen Z, 38%. Among parents of young children, 34%. And, my favourite detail, among people earning over $100,000 a year, 33%.

54% of users say they could not make ends meet without it. 68% admit it makes them overspend.

Groceries. In four payments.

Here is why I am telling you this, and it is not to ruin your Monday morning, which I am sure is full of “fun” emails with “ASAP or Urgent” in the headline.

You see, the economic model is quietly accumulating variables that our standard instruments were never built to measure. Phantom household debt is one. The migration of lending from banks, regulated, reported, visible, into private credit funds is another. 

And the VOODOO+FOMO machine we discussed in Fomonomics, which has minted trillions in paper wealth on metrics of pure faith, is now producing an uncomfortable picture. The share of economic reality that our official indicators actually capture is shrinking. And the indicators we do have are, by and large, lagging ones. They tell you what already happened, months after it happened, in categories designed for a previous economy.

The people that fly our planes big and small are increasingly flying on instruments that measure the wrong sky.

So what does this mean for us… middle managers, stuck between Excel and PowerPoint, running our own small economies?

It means the same disease lives in your organisation.

Whatever quarterly indicators you rely on — engagement scores, utilisation, NPS, the traffic-light slide — they are your GDP: lagging, aggregated, and blind to exactly the things that will hurt you.

Your company has its own phantom debt: the resignation being drafted, the client quietly interviewing your competitor, the technical debt nobody put on a slide, the team that stopped arguing because it stopped caring.

None of it appears in the dashboard until the quarter it detonates.

And the fix, however uncomfortable it sounds for our profession its not another framework or slide.

It is taxi drivers… or whatever closest we can get to in our orgs.

Ask them open-ended questions.

"How are things?"

Then be quiet and listen. You will receive more true information in twenty minutes than in a quarter of steering committees.

And here is the single most leading indicator available to any manager. Ask your taxi drivers, in whatever words fit: does leadership understand what is actually going on here? If several of them, independently, tell you the leadership is living in la-la land… ring every bell you have.

It means your organisation has lost contact with its own ground truth, and in ambiguous times it is making decisions on data that describes a company that no longer exists. That is how collapses happen.

If you have seen The Big Short, you have watched this method work. While the whole financial system trusted the ratings, Steve Carell's character got on a plane to Florida and talked to the people closest to the ground: mortgage brokers, homeowners, a stripper with five houses. Official metrics said AAA. The taxi drivers said collapse.

The lesson: ground-truthing is not a nice-to-have for curious managers. In an economy of phantom variables, it is a managerial requirement, as basic as reading a P&L.

Get in the taxi. Ask how things are.

Talk soon,
Sultanbek