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He may not be far off.
These bubbles usually last approximately five years. (Or at least that’s been the case historically.) We’re in year four. I’m actually keeping a portion of my portfolio in cash so when the crash comes I can take advantage, though I may move my whole retirement account into bonds and money market funds after the new year.
Trump just said in a response to a question about our $40 trillion debt (jesus, that’s a lot of zeroes), “You know, inflation, certain levels of inflation, will also pay off that debt very rapidly. Very rapidly.” https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/trump-just-soft-launched-higher-inflation-as-the-new-solution-for-rebalancing-the-40-trillion-us-national-debt/ar-AA2dpocG
So I hope that cash isn’t USD. Honestly, all currencies look pretty bad right now. And if Trump triggers Iran into destroying the Middle East (and maybe triggering Israel to nuke, if Trump hasn’t already), the only thing that’s going to be worth a damn is cigarettes and penicillin.
Astonishing really.
This is the guy running the US like a business.
Don’t worry about debt, just stoke up inflation so it does t seem like so much money.
Nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan.
The “he’s a businessman and he’s going to run the government like he runs a business” argument is as stupid as it was prescient.
Is there something I can do with my work 401k?
You could reallocate into bonds if you believe that it will tank the equity market as a whole. Most available options to allocate into a pretty broad so it’s not totally exposed, just expect lower returns in the mean time and be prepared to reallocate into more growth exposure if/when the broader crash happens. Difficult to time so beware.
Bonds are a bad call as well, as the US government is screwed on interest and will be inflating.
Gold is a better call, this looks like stagflation coming.
The thing is the collapse is like a random chance every week/day. At some point some human being will decide fuckem im not working all weekend to bail them out again and that’s when the crash will happen. That’s literally what happened in 2008, bear sterns and Lehman brothers for decades just rolled over their debt until one day the banks were just like yeah nah we had enough go ask the govt for help and that was the crash. It easily could have happened months earlier or months later, some bank execs were just in a room and finally decided they wanted to get off the ride one and that was the day it crashed. Just human emotion at that point if it would have happened the prior month or following month instead.
Exactly this. The entire market is held together by people who are willing to bend over backwards to keep it working. And all it takes is two or three of those to decide “enough is enough” at the same time, and suddenly all of the market’s sins are laid bare. And at that point, the investors panic and everything snowballs.
He’s been saying this for 4 years
I’d probably have better luck shorting stocks if I could trigger a (rightful) panic like this guy can.
I’ve come to realize that I was assuming that there was a limit somewhere to “the market staying irrational”. I’m not so sure anymore
The market has never been rational.
You could argue that a heavily debt-based business that requires years and years of more debt before becoming profitable would respond to rising interest rates quite negatively, but, yeah, the whole thing is already enitrely irrational.
I’m keeping some popcorn in reserve for OpenAI’s IPO.
I don’t get why they haven’t gone already.
If they don’t get their IPO off before the bubble pops, they might be losing out on a trillion with a capital T
The AI bubble will “burst” as soon as they figure out how to inflict all the damage onto regular working people. The housing bubble bursting is what enabled the ownership class to kick a bunch of working people out of their homes and then buy up all the recently vacated real estate for cheap. Nothing about the damage that the rich did to our economy caused any of them to face any actual consequences.
The promise of AI was that it would replace all the workers, but it’s not doing that fast enough and it’s beginning to look like it never will. We’ve been hearing that the AI bubble will “burst any day now” for years at this point, but if it happened right now, the ownership class are the ones who would be left holding the bag, and that can’t be allowed to happen. When they find a way to take it out of our hides, we’ll see that suddenly the “invisible hand of the free market” will present a scenario such that the floodgates open and the bloodbath is finally allowed to proceed. I imagine that’s why they started wrapping up so many pension funds and the like in AI investments.
ownership class
pension funds
Same thing. Pension funds ARE the ownership class.
I’ve been commenting that people over 55 own 52% of the US and baby boomers as a generation own ~8x more than billionaires as a class, but I re-checked and I’d quoted the wrong number in a bunch of my comments. 52% is for baby boomers only. All over 55s added together are actually over 70%. Let that sink in.
The entire goal of the economy is to let old people enjoy the spoils of the young’s work. Even billionaires are just a symptom of a larger, systemic issue (which is not to say they shouldn’t be hunted for sport, that should still happen).
Over 55 isn’t babyboomers anymore that’s gen x.
I think this kind of data is exactly what you’d expect to see in a somewhat equal society: you work your whole life, saving, of course you’ve got more savings then people who haven’t been working their whole lives.
Really I suspect averaging here is skewing your perception, that 70% can hide a few super wealthy and many more poor (which is what you’d expect given 1% of the population own more than the combined bottom 95% ).
Over 55 isn’t babyboomers anymore that’s gen x.
And silent. But notice how little the percent goes up when you add both silent and much of gen x to it. Most of it is still baby boomers.
I think this kind of data is exactly what you’d expect to see in a somewhat equal society: you work your whole life, saving, of course you’ve got more savings then people who haven’t been working their whole lives.
Yes. So why are people whining that their paychecks aren’t rising, that they can’t afford property, etc? All that goes to old people who, via retirement funds mostly, own the companies that young people work for. The housing is owned by old people and companies belonging to old people. If the US suddenly had a 50 dollar an hour minimum wage, old people would be fucked and have to go back to work because their holdings would no longer be worth shit.
Really I suspect averaging here is skewing your perception, that 70% can hide a few super wealthy and many more poor (which is what you’d expect given 1% of the population own more than the combined bottom 95% ).
Median baby boomer is worth like 400k, average is near 2 mill, so of course it’s still skewed, 10% of baby boomers own 70% of their wealth. But what I’m trying to argue is that you can’t have both a great working life and a great retirement life at the same time unless the amount of retired people is small. Baby boomers enjoyed a great working life and now they’re enjoying a great retirement life, but they can only enjoy the latter because everyone else’s wages stagnated. No other generation has ever been as rich as the baby boomers, no other generation’s wealth outclassed the preceding generation as early as theirs. They’re enjoying more time at the top than anyone before them. Gen X and millennials on the other hand are getting there much later in life and I don’t know if Gen Z will ever be the wealthiest generation before most millennials are dead.
People just aren’t having enough children for this whole retirement thing to work much longer. Millennials might never retire, Gen Z will definitely not retire (and this isn’t specific to the capitalist system). But we get to pay baby boomers to retire.
Eventually we need to start talking about getting rid of retirement altogether. We can’t have 5 retirees living off the back of one working person, that’s absurd.
Ironically the AI everyone’s fighting against, combined with a better economic system of course, is the only thing that can change things. When there are truly very few jobs that need a human, we can finally consider having so many non-working people for so few working people, without outright straddling all the working people with debt. Maybe not AI as it is now, but AI that can truly replace knowledge workers to the point that it can design automation for physical jobs on its own. As it is now, even supposedly “communist” countries need people working well into the 50s and 60s, and it’ll get worse when their demographics crises hit.
If the US suddenly had a 50 dollar an hour minimum wage, old people would be fucked and have to go back to work because their holdings would no longer be worth shit.
This is a counter factual, I think it’d be really hard to prove what would have happened to current people over 55’s savings if wages had kept pace.
I don’t actually think that people need to work forever otherwise the old prey upon the young. I think this is more of an inequality issue, that is remedied with taxes on wealth (i’m mostly basing that opinion on “capital in the 21st century”).
Eventually we need to start talking about getting rid of retirement altogether
Yes yes, make the old’s work again! WTF dude. You know this will happen to you if your lucky right? Personally i want my old age or my parents to not be plagued by want. I see it as part of my duty to support my parents, on account of them supporting me. It seems like you’ve consumed too much zero sum game.
I also think AI has way too many negative externalities (more propping up the ultra wealthy, contributing to climate change) to counter it’s positive effects.
This is a counter factual, I think it’d be really hard to prove what would have happened to current people over 55’s savings if wages had kept pace.
Well they’d certainly own less, that’s for sure. Corporate profits would’ve gone down, and corporate profits are where most old people’s wealth comes from (401k, pensions, etc).
Yes yes, make the old’s work again! WTF dude. You know this will happen to you if your lucky right? Personally i want my old age or my parents to not be plagued by want. I see it as part of my duty to support my parents, on account of them supporting me.
The boomers had to support their parents. We have to support our parents and some of their childless friends. Our children will have to support more like 10-15 people each. Unless we raise our retirement ages enough that we aren’t a burden on our children. In general, if you’re under 40 and thinking of retiring one day, you’re selfish as fuck. Personally I at least acknowledge to myself that my desire to retire one day, is extremely selfish, as it requires me to accumulate resources that other people could use.
It seems like you’ve consumed too much zero sum game.
While there are places in economic where zero sum game does not apply (e.g you get more out of education than the money invested into it), resources are largely a zero sum game, as is time (labour). Once an apple has been grown and harvested, only one person can eat it. Once a house is built, only one family can live in it at a time. Etc. When there are fewer people working, less work can get done, unless those people work more hours. To have enough resources for everyone, a big enough share of people has to work. As we have more old people, we need people working longer, unless we figure out a way to replace human labor. As you’re against AI, there’s little real way to do that.
The whole retirement thing is predicated on growth. There’s enough growth that you can tax young people, either via corporations underpaying them (corporations owned by old people), or via direct taxation and a national pension (where the old people benefitting at least benefit a bit more evenly), without it weighing down on them too badly. This worked great for a while because the population kept growing, but that has pretty much stopped in the developed world.
Which is why I keep telling people: If you don’t want retirement ages to rise, you better be making babies and tons of them.
They own, but they don’t control that ownership. Their savings are used as investment funds, but very few actually know what they are invested in. That control is in the hands of the indexes. S&P, NASDAQ and the like. Just because NASDAQ blessed SpaceX with being part of their index, millions of pensions bought the stock.
They don’t control, yes - the control (on the level of the individual companies) is being handled for their benefit though. Line must go up for the shareholders - aka old people.
…handled for their benefit though.
Theoretically, yes. In reality they’re a long way down the food chain.
So shareholders are now a long way down the food chain? If that’s the case, maybe publicly traded companies aren’t as evil as we once thought.
People investing to try to have a pension at the end of their working life are a long way down the food chain.
i.e. every working person.
On an individual level: Yes. Even a thousand (median) retirees don’t own as much as one billionaire. But in total: All the old people together own an order of magnitude more assets than all the billionaires put together. Because there are so many old people. A large part of it will be their homes of course, but there’s still a metric fuckton of stock in there via retirement funds.
Go look at Amazon for a particularly egregious example of a corporation that abuses its workers. One would think Jeff Bezos owns a huge part of it, but actually he owns about 8% of it, being the biggest individual shareholder. 75% of float and 68% of all shares are owned by institutions. Then look at the biggest institutional holders: They’re all companies providing ETFs and mutual funds. Most of that (obviously not all) is retail investors and retirement funds, as a lot of rich people find such fund investments boring (average ~10% annual growth long term is not enough when line must always go up). Thus a large proportion of the wage theft by Amazon benefits people investing for retirement, or that have already retired.
Some economic systems fix this by giving every worker and every retiree an amount of money every month and not allowing anyone (retired OR working) to have any investments at all. This puts an upper limit on how much any individual person can own and spend. It affects retirees more than workers because retirees are the ones who have had time to amass wealth in their working years. There’s less inequality, but the downside is that no matter how hard you work, your retirement will be exactly the same as everyone else, including those who barely work.
There’s no perfect answer. Under capitalism, workers will naturally feel that the ownership class (mostly old people who were smart and prosperous enough to invest, or lucked into a job with a real pension) own too much. Under communism, retirees are likely going to feel they aren’t being rewarded enough for the hard work they put in throughout the years. But crucially, neither extreme, nor really anything in between, addresses the fact that most countries’ populations are aging, and the lives we’ve gotten used to, have been based on there being fewer old people than working people. That’s why I see only two solutions: We all accept that we have much less (and yes, there should be a wealth cap too), or enough work gets automated that not many workers are needed anymore AND the economic system accounts for it (doesn’t have to be communism, but it can’t be unbridled capitalism)
The “invisible hand of the market” is such a fascinating myth, because it frames the results of capitalist endeavors as inevitable and almost holy - but as soon as the sufficiently wealthy and well-connected suffer a setback, then “government bailouts” are granted.
The invisible hand is actually very visible of you dare to look close enough.
I have no AI investments outside of shit my pension probably buys
I am looking forward to investor focus moving to stocks I do buy though
I am not a financial advisor, and this is not financial advice.
Maybe you should check how much of your pension is invested where.
It can shock you how much of your money is invested in just 5 stocks.
Then talk to an advisor
AI is obviously a bubble.
That said, Burry has also predicted 6 of the last 2 crashes.
He got Tesla wrong. Very hard to underestimate meme stocks.
Does anyone expect a large business to not fail when theyve been as poorly run as Tesla?
Also can we talk about how Musk seemingly is propping up all his companies with the values of his other investments? And that most of that money is government contracts?
Just like this “bubble” has supposedly been about to pop for years.
More like 20. Besides, most of these articles are just reporters misunderstanding Burry’s trades. Guy is a trader, in and out. By time you know his positions, he’s sold and moved on.
Calling a bubble is easy.
Calling the top of the bubble or the bottom of the crash is the more or less impossible part.
It could very well be a bubble, and come crashing down to a low point that is still higher than it is today.
I agree in principle. It’s getting harder to believe that is possible at this point.
A combination of 1) companies maturing their AI policy and ending the “infinite play time” model most have had since 2021 e.g. cutting spending and 2) open source and open parameter models becoming better and better and cheaper. Data centers will still be in demand for #2 but the ai providers will hurt.
I don’t follow this extremely closely, but didn’t most companies end number 1 at least 6+ months ago?
Just like the housing bubble, right?
I had a boomer normie ask me how to use AI to develop his new “business” website telling me that he didn’t want to hire a developer if the developer would just use AI anyway.
This guy doesn’t know what a router is, and was asking me for help trying to understand what the AI was telling him, and it was the most basic shit.
When the normies are trying to invest in AI, they’re the last to invest and know to throw money at it. That was a big signal to me that the bubble is about to pop. Money is running out and the boomers are trying to get in on it.
When the normies are trying to invest in AI, they’re the last to invest and know to throw money at it
They are also the largest group by far. Doesn’t really mean much aside from the fact that adoption is now widespread.
I don’t think it’s going to add up to a trillion dollars a year though, lol.
AI and the Enshittification Era w/ Cory Doctorow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAIJRjb-Bw
The CEO of SoftBank says they need five trillion a year.
https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/softbank-groups-ceo-says-5-112543307.html
…to “meet demand.” …
He’s saying “there is no bubble.”
You’d think he would know better…
Well it is SoftBank.
Guess I’m going with AU then 🤷
Exactly this. If you hear people talking about investments around the Thanksgiving table, its time to bail. All the smart people got in months ago and have left, they are just looking for bag holders now.
Lmao, I think all the smart people avoided investing in AI in the first place 😂
there was major money to be made if you had the money to start with
I own a beer bar, and we work with some friends who have a catering business that does pop ups on our patio. They’ve been using AI to generate flyers and then tag us to have us share them to our larger audience. I stopped doing it because they look like trash, get low engagement, and are off brand for our art-inspired space. They got upset with me that we weren’t helping promote, and I explained my position on their AI flyers, and they sent a very lengthy email back about how AI is being utilized by small businesses in ways that we’re still scratching the surface to understand its value. I popped the email into chatgpt and asked if it wrote that email and it said it did, lol. Now I have more work on my hands to design their flyers for them, but it’s worth it.
I popped the email into chatgpt and asked if it wrote that email and it said it did, lol
It doesn’t work that way tho
I mean, it literally does though. The email sounded phony AF, especially knowing that the person’s first language isn’t English and it was overly proper sounding. I copy and pasted it into chatgpt and said “did you write this email?“ and it’s response was” yes, based on the writing style and phrasing, I wrote this content."
Someone put in the intro to the book Frankenstein into an ai checker and it confirmed it to be 100 percent written by an LLM. It’s not deterministic.
It’s not deterministic.
This is the first thing about LLMs always, and what most people can’t seem to understand.
LLMs are a thing where you give an input and get an output, and it happens to correspond to reality much of the time. But there’s no actual understanding there.
it’s so bizarre to me that people who work with food don’t realize that the ai trash is producing images that are REVOLTING, do not look like food, and actively deter people from their products.
you’d be better off with a half lit shitty polaroid of actual food than putting that trash on your branding, so much of it is nightmare fuel
I used to work in a wine store. Customers would always joke “hahaha i just pick them by the label 😂” and I would always say. That’s not stupid, wine is about aesthetics. Someone who makes good wine will appreciate the value of a good label. And the inverse is true, people with poor taste won’t care about their label, but they won’t be able to make good wine, either.
I’m saying judge a book by its cover. How else are you gonna know what’s in the book without looking at its cover??
. . . You’re supposed to open the book . . .
I had a friend in Uni who studied food science. She went on to work in marketing a a sculptor for advertisements. They sculptures were hand crafted to look delicious but would have been completely inedible, if anyone was stupid enough to eat them.
It is an art form and unfortunately a lot of people fail to appreciate art.
/me tries to eat the chiseled from marble pie… ooh, this tastes like owies
Isn’t a beer bar just a bar?
Typically, one expects a “bar” to have beer and liquor and the ability to make at least basic mixed drinks (rum and Coke, gin and tonic, etc.).
A “beer bar” usually has a wider variety of beers on draft and no liquor or mixed drinks.
Damn you could just have a lot of beers and liquor as well, sounds gimmicky
Some places have different licensing costs and requirements for places that serve beer and wine only vs also serving spirits.
Upvoting this obviously human response
It’s a safe bet.
The bubble will burst, that’s our boom-bust cycle. I think we’re at the point where it is always a few bad decisions away.
I’m actually impressed that it’s still going
Coincidentally, The FED was made to stop boom-bust cycles before WWI. It’s never, ever worked, and it will never start working.
Yeah the fed did a great job preventing the Great Depression lmao. You know what really stops boom/bust ? Taxing the wealthy and holding them accountable for their crimes. Also all those pesky monopoly regulations, post Great Depression regulations like glass stegal and other regulations that have been systematically dismantled in the last 40 years.
He’s predicted around sixteen market crashes so far by my count. The dude got lucky once and has been riding the fame ever since. I’m not necessarily disagreeing that this whole thing will crash, but timing is the important part and he keeps missing it. I’ll not be making any financial decisions on his recommended timeline anytime soon. He may as well be Dave Ramsay imo.
Trump will make sure it doesn’t crash by avoiding all regulations and anything that would make shareholders sweat.
“AI investment” is the reason why we’re not in a full blown “official” recession. He doesn’t want a recession for “his” economy while he is president. When the AI bubble bursts the GOP will be blaming the Democrats and will ask to be put back on power again
The question is can he float the problem for that long, the current pace of AI investment simply requires more returns than are possible, something like 1/5 of the entire GDP of the united states at a minimum yearly. At some point the emperors lack of clothes will become impossible to hide no matter how much they try.
Not to mention US debt is currently in a precarious position right now. I don’t understand how one can even possibly bailout these companies while the USA is sitting on a dicey position itself.
Big short investor who has been wrong about every prediction.
OpenAI had their little failure of a presentation recently, and they’re introducing a “fast response” tier for 6x the current subscription cost. This is their attempt to get people used to higher pricing. They are bleeding money, and they will need to raise prices sooner than later to start attempting to make it back.
Once they do, a good chunk of their customers will simply stop paying, forcing the AI companies to further raise prices, causing more customers to leave, etc.
AI companies are trying (and failing) to be indispensable, and they need that to have any hope of survival. It’s only a matter of time before they collapse, and only then might we see what’s actually beneficial about machine learning.
I saw a meme recently- WinRAR is more profitable than OpenAI. Kind of funny to think about
I’m a WinRAR license owner and I’m not paying OpenAI
If it does, it needs to pop so hard that EVERYONE involved with it can’t even afford to be heard of anymore.
