It is written on the wall
Back in Q4-2006 (sorry, we were already there), journalists had been doing their job of highlighting the US residential mess as a trigger to a coming financial crisis. Europe is still paying the price of that transatlantic mess as highlighted by many economists. Journalists alerted, markets played on. And then crashed.
Nearly 20 years later, the journalists across the planet (plus researchers, politicians, central bankers, philosophers, now Pope Leo), have been writing and alerting about the untoward aspects of AI. They are all deeply concerned about a genie out of its bottle, after 3 years of utter fascination. The genie will not be returned to its bottle without a governance rethink of such magnitude (Tech giants need oversight to protect national security) that it is out of reach, let alone the fact that a governance foundation cannot happen if China (and Europe?) are not included.
Nearly 20 years later, the journalists across the planet (plus researchers, politicians, central bankers, philosophers, now Pope Leo), have been writing and alerting about the untoward aspects of AI. They are all deeply concerned about a genie out of its bottle, after 3 years of utter fascination. The genie will not be returned to its bottle without a governance rethink of such magnitude (Tech giants need oversight to protect national security) that it is out of reach, let alone the fact that a governance foundation cannot happen if China (and Europe?) are not included.
In between, markets click on, willing to pay absurd money for projects that are known to be not profitable (AI tokens cost 3 to 4 time more than their current selling price, and there is no supply scarcity, Deepseek slashed its prices by 4 recently). This matches the reality that there is hardly any paying taker, even at that subsidised price.
We deem that the steam roller of the three coming mega-IPOs (SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic for a total of $3.5Tn) has made every market participant blind. Advisers are blind because they see the commission income from these IPOs, retail investors are blind because they want to be in, mesmerized by the promises and the fact that buying the successive Trump engineered dips hurt none of them. Index providers will bow to the attraction of hosting those mammoth listings, and trash their rules, in effect transferring risk from pre IPO owners to post IPO ones.
Only the creative, entrepreneurial US capitalism could create the conditions to spawn this industry. Only its taste for risk and its financial ability to slice and dice that risk across a variety of asset classes and investors, could help raise the possible $150bn in the next 6 months.
Behind the IPO flamboyant curtains, the picture is that of the appropriation of market forces by a small coterie of visionaries whose projection of the future borders on the unacceptable for the wider political order.
It may be necessary for a crash to come, for the wider society to reaffirm what matters.
That crash will hurt of course.
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