When I first heard the rumor that the US economy was being propped up by artificially inflated growth in the AI sector, I thought it was laughable. But the signs keep piling up, and if twenty years on Wall Street have taught me one thing, it’s that selling off before a crash is pointless on its own—the only way to benefit is to get everyone else to sell off too.
I am an early and eager adopter of brilliant new inventions, from the Google Glass to private mortgage-backed securities—and, at first, I was just as excited about AI. I fired my secretary to make room for ChatGPT to read and write my emails. I decimated the backlog of unread books on my shelf, zapping them into neat two-page summaries and digesting them easily as Gemini-powered bedtime stories. When a man on the street outside my apartment told me he needed an angel investor for his AI-powered startup, I called the police on him, because he looked poor and his coat was dirty. But when my nephew made me the same offer, I started him off with $4 million! I was the world’s biggest AI fanatic.
However, reporting on circular investments in the AI sector has shaken my faith in the technology. The same companies that told me they were building God a year ago seem strangely fixated on grocery lists today. The AI tower is starting to collapse, and as an investor, it is my solemn duty to sledgehammer some walls out before I evacuate.
Let me ask you this: is the next GPT model really going to be any better than the last? How many more CS classes can you blow through with Claude Code? How much longer can you hide your Grok e-sex sessions from your wife who hates you? The answer, probably, is not long.
All good things must come to an end, my friends. But not all good things are the bedrock of the nation’s economy. But doesn’t it fill you with a sickly curiosity? Don’t you want to see the show it makes before it goes?
As the unraveling of the rules-based international order deals blow after agonizing blow to America’s role as the anchor of global finance, I tremble in giddy anticipation. I feel like Jay Buchanan, the protagonist of the Great Gatsby, poised at the edge of a glorious renewal. It’s all going to fall down! All of it! The horrible lie we keep telling ourselves! The burning from the inside! A cleansing conflagration! It’s time! Say it with me!
Sell!
Sell!
Sell!
Join me next week as I discuss how to minimize your profits (but maximize your fun!) betting on prediction markets.
