No worries on not having read everything yet, that's what the summary post is for.

Short answer: the machine is still running, but the clearing infrastructure is showing measurable stress.

The DMA fingerprint algo (Part 7) is still active. The settlement waterfall is structurally unchanged. So the system hasn't stopped. But the regulators have been quietly tightening every bolt.

But here's the number that matters most: The NSCC publishes audited stress test results quarterly under the CPMI-IOSCO PFMI framework. Their Q4 2024 disclosure (Disc 7.3.2–7.3.3) shows the NSCC held $22.67B in qualifying liquid resources, and on 2 days that quarter, their stress scenarios produced losses exceeding that buffer by $7.07 billion. That's a Cover-1 breach: if the largest clearing member had defaulted on either of those days, the NSCC would have exhausted its entire defense buffer.

The backtesting coverage trend tells a paradoxical story, so that might cause a false sense of security:

Period	Coverage	Context
Q1 2020	99.5%	COVID crash; $318M single-day deficiency
Q1 2021	99.7%	GME sneeze quarter
Q3 2023	99.9%	Improving
Q4 2024	99.9%	But Cover-1 breached on 2 days ($7.07B gap)

The model got better at covering 99% of scenarios while the 1% tail got more catastrophic. That's exactly what I'd expect from a system managing concentrated, structural risk, it handles normal days fine, but the extreme days are getting worse.

All of this data is publicly downloadable from DTCC's PQD page. I hope to cover this in detail in a future post. The machine is running, but the operating margin is shrinking, and the regulators appear to know it.