The AI Boom May Be Sowing Seeds of Another Financial Crisis
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
"There's no free lunch!", I told myself, but it was becoming increasingly hard to ignore my barber, the cashier at the grocery store, my dentist, my landscaper - all who had bought highly leveraged properties and had actually made profit. I'm not ashamed to say I started to look into it myself - I was even ready to purchase some leveraged properties myself but kept getting outbid by even crazy offers.
Then 2008 happened. It happened suddenly. First it was on the news. Then quietly, people began to stay at home. Then move out.
It was both unsettling but also reassuring. My home value halved overnight (it's 800% up now so I'm doing OK) and mu neighborhood went mostly empty (bankruptcies, foreclosures).
Now again in 2026, my barber, the cashier at the grocery store, my dentist, my landscaper - all cannot stop talking about Grok Bot, about "Chat" (they usually mean ChatGPT or Gemini).
Maybe this time I can get in and get out in time, get real rich!
Maybe this time it's different!
Off topic: I first wrote "2029" instead of "1929" because habit. Wow, the start of the Great Depression was 97 years ago? I find that surprising.
Consumer. Their usecases seem pretty valid - the landscaper is using it to drum up more business, has agents responding to incoming emails and texts, just like my dentist and barber.
The cashier uses GrokBot to transcribe notes to her manager. Her company has a very bad inventory app (I don't want to name names but it's a very large nationwide chain) so she literally exports inventory into an excel and feeds it into GrokBot as a way to run queries.
I can see nothing wrong in them just like I could see no wrong in buying properties and flipping them for a profit because there was so much demand at that time.
If you weren't buying houses 2003-2009, you have no idea how crazy it was. People would buy homes unseen in Olathe, KS.
It's likely just me but it just feels eerily familiar. I hope we are all wrong this time around.
In other words, all the landscapers are equally efficient and unless they collude on pricing, the then pass on savings to their customers.
I mean, they should be. It's a transformative technology that is doing something that was science-fiction five years ago, and it going to make a few people trillionaires, and it's not entirely clear where it will leave the rest of us.
That doesn't mean that you should, like, be rushing to be a bagholder.
I think the challenge is, in 2026, no one has a clue what the bagholding will look like
Well, since you seemed to know what you needed to do back then (but didn't take action), what do you think you need to do now to "get rich"?
For example, is it one of these?
1. "Being a regular here necessarily means you cannot actually have that opinion, so you are lying to us."
2. "You may believe that, but posting it here is not logical because nobody here will be receptive to it."
3. "You may believe that, but posting it here is an immoral offense against the management."
This time it will be different.
I know you capitalist love money more then anything, but the rest of use like to live healthy lives and enjoy things like good books and spending time with our friends and family.
You give me too much credit. I didn't know how to "get rich" back then and neither do I, now.
I didn't take action because I didn't know. I kept getting outbid because I didn't know how I would pay $1M for a home that I would struggle to rent out for more than $800/mo.
That helps us decide whether there is some purpose and meaning to the entire story about the system.
I never got rich as I never ended up buying a property for investment. I just kept on getting outbid by others. I kept getting outbid because I didn't know how I would pay $1M for a home that I would struggle to rent out for more than $800/mo.
The others reinvested their profits into the next purchase until the music stopped. Everyone but my dentist got wiped out.
My dentist just made a payment everytime he got a late notice which was like once every 4-6 months as the note changed hands, often getting lost in the chaos. He refinanced all the properties around 2012-2013 and invested the proceedings all into one multi storey clinic which is doing very well.
If you have the right heuristic for when to get out of the scheme you can become an overnight millionaire. I don't have it. Statistically, few people can.
With any luck, all the billionaires in the world will jump out of their windows, just like they did in the ‘29 stock market crash.
October of ‘29. Just three more years to wait.
It is a sign of a deeply broken system.
And I am not even speculating if the growth/revenue projections are realistic in the first place, which, if not, would be another trigger
The stock market is unpredictable precisely because everybody is trying to guess what is going to happen next. Dollar cost averaging takes the guessing away.
The bubble can't pop until most investors believe it's not a bubble, it's the new normal. As long as they believe it's a bubble they'll have money on the sidelines to throw in whenever it goes down.
Or at least it can't pop for purely financial reasons. It might still pop if, say, Anthropic and OpenAI both announce they've hit the scaling wall, or Iran somehow bombs TSMC, or a court rules they have to pay a royalty to every book author every time they answer a prompt.
Developing the habit of investing at frequent regular intervals eliminates the desire to time the market. And that's what threads like these are about, for most people.
I think everyone is worried and, at least in this case, being cautious.
My finances are in crisis.
You know whos winning ... the bitcoin miners retiring unprofitable cards, if they still have them.
Good job guys.
After bitcoin halfed enough, the electricity cost more for the miners.
Now with the AI boom, people are paying premium prices for low end cards, because they run AI tasks exponentially faster than CPUs do.
So the electrical load that was once centralized at the mining site, gets distributed.
Being able to schedule your AI agents to work during off peak electrical prices, and sleep during peak pricing, seems to be a stablizing factor for the grid.
Im talking about the used video card market.
Not the billion dollar data center market.
Prices are up 35% in the last 3 months alone, and I just paid way too much for a RTX 5060 Ti 16GB for the ram.
Adapt to the worlds problems.
Don't adopt them.
Bitcoin mining hasn't used GPUs in ages. They've been all-in on ASICs since 2013 or so; even if the GPUs were free, they wouldn't be worth running.
Makes the binance crypto incident look like nothing (and everyone was made whole).
The hidden $3.2T AI debt on the other hand...
China is ready to step in with millions of PhD-level graduates.
Keep in mind that today, if essential workers go on strike, those in power have to listen. What happens if people on UBI refuse to... something? Especially in a world of increasingly automated policing and surveillance?
I think the humans still have quite a chance to overthrow a police state tyranny.
But what you say also gives us a path back to economic relevance: you can make money by selling policing equipment to increasingly paranoid states. They'll never be satisfied with what they already have. It doesn't even have to be a useful product, it just has to satisfy their paranoia while also fueling it.
Interesting times.
I would like to take away the gasoline before they figure out that wood burns better.
Most people can't agree on what God In A Box (AGI, the singularity, whatever) even is. We don't have a widely-accepted definition for it.
The SMART criteria for creating goals has been around since 1980 [0]. Goals need to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. This is stuff that they teach most people in bachelor degree-level college course. Not even. Maybe in high school or associates degree-level courses.
If God In A Box was the goal that SV sold all of these investors on to the tune of over a trillion dollars of investment, the best thing we could do with everyone involved is have a massive settlement where all of their money just goes to pay off a fraction of the national debt and they're banished to live in the Alaskan wilderness, never allowed near more than $50 at a time or long-distance telecommunications devices again for as long as they live.