After the 2008 crash many central banks enacted low and negative interest rates for any financial institution that could borrow directly from the central bank, or indirectly from those favored financial institutions. This cheap money spigot for the wealthy, to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars, never got turned off until this year, when inflation finally crept into the economy.
This unprecedented monetary inflation was so enormous that the wealthy ran out of the normal places to invest it, and instead turned to things like buying up tens of thousands of single family homes, and trailer parks. In other words, inflation eventually made it out into the real economy, but only in a rentier fashion.

Of course the Republicans blamed Biden for the inflation. Both parties blamed Putin. Pundits blamed millennials. Democrats blamed corporations.
For a change, the Democrats are closest to the truth. Wall Street went on a huge borrowing binge since 2009, and borrowing from the Fed is a primary way that money gets created. Combine that with record corporate profits from price hikes, and we have a smoking gun of evidence for inflation.
This mountain of corporate debt in a time of rising interest rates is like a tower of jenga blocks.

UBS analyst Matt Mish noted the number of companies that face elevated borrowing costs increases sharply for bonds trading above an all-in yield of 10 per cent. More than 8 per cent of the US high-yield bond market is now above this level.

“The weakness is broadening out,” he said. “It tells you that at the margin, this is not just a rates issue, it’s also a credit issue. There are not many companies that can finance at north of 10 per cent for a sustained period of time.”

But here's where they all get it wrong: It was much more than just an American thing.
The global financial system is connected and codependent. The ECB, the BOJ, the BOC, and all of the major banks of the planet are joined at the hip.
The ECB and BOJ have been even more aggressive than the Fed at cutting interest rates and buying bonds. The most aggressive central bank of all post-2008, and the most opaque, was probably the Bank of China (BOC). Which makes what is going on in China so much more important than the attention it is getting.

The four Henan banks stopped withdrawals April 18.

It seems those banks told their depositors weren't actually deposits, they were investments, so we don't have to pay you back.

Unable to retrieve their money, depositors started to protest online and in person. On May 23, protests broke out before security services stopped them.

The people who had lost all of their money weren't going to sit still for this and began organizing for a mass demonstration. Before they could travel, they were blocked by software that the government uses as social credit. Cops are going to schools to tell the kids to ask their parents to back off from demonstrations.
However the people eventually got around this and rallied to protest on July 10.

According to a report in The Post by Christian Shepherd and Pei-Lin Wu, the demonstrations were met by dozens of uniformed police officers as well as heavyset men mostly wearing white tops. The blue-shirted officers stood by as the burly men in white shirts attacked the crowd. Protesters were dragged down a flight of steps before being carried away.

Finally, we have this.

Breaking news

Tanks are being put on the streets in China to protect the banks.

This is because the Henan branch of the Bank of China declaring that people's savings in their branch are now 'investment products' and can't be withdrawn.

sound pic.twitter.com/cwTPjGz84K

— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) July 20, 2022

This all began when the Chinese government realized that the real estate bubble (that they caused by making money to cheap) was out of control and they began tightening lending in 2021. Soon after that Evergrande imploded to the tune of $300 Billion.
Real estate developers suddenly couldn't get credit, so their projects stopped. After a few months Chinese homebuyers decided that they weren't going to keep paying mortgages for homes that weren't being built.

A mortgage boycott in China is “still multiplying” and threatens to “become much more widespread,” according to analysts who say the homeowner protest is already affecting 235 property developments in 24 of China’s 31 provinces.
...China’s growing middle classes have piled their savings into property, believing it to be a safe haven for their hard-earned cash. Tianlei Huang, a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) think tank, cites a 2019 survey by China’s central bank, which showed that nearly 60% of the total assets owned by urban Chinese households were in commercial and residential property.

No nation is more committed to putting all of their savings into real estate than China, and for the first time in a generation home prices have declined.
Now people are starting to wonder if this will spill into the corporate sector.

One troubled firm, Shimao, this month missed a payment on a $1bn bond, blaming “significant changes to the macro environment of the property sector”. Country Garden, the biggest developer of all, saw a bond due for redemption in 2024 fall to less than 50 cents on the dollar, according to data from Bloomberg.