Modern financial systems rely on safe assets. A “safe asset” is defined by three characteristics (Brunnermeier et al., 2016, 2017, Brunnermeier and Huang, 2018, Gorton and Ordonez, 2022). First, it has a low default risk, or high asset “quality”. Second, like a good friend, a safe asset retains its value during bad times (“robustness”). Third, it can be sold at or near current (robust) market prices in most market conditions (“liquidity”). […]