US Stocks Are Down $800 Billion And The Reason Isn’t Just The Trade War…

It’s AI, but not in the way that you think…

As you probably know, the stock market’s looking a little battered right now, losing $800 billion dollars of hypothetical money.

There are a number of reasons for the dip but a big one is just the general uncertainty in the market right now. And, in turn, a big reason for that is the looming spectre of tariffs (yes, again). After SCOTUS killed POTUS’s use of emergency powers to make sweeping increases to import taxes.

But there’s something else that’s got peeps spooked and curiously it’s not the AI bubble, but it also is, and, in fact, it kind of isn’t, but also is.

It seems to me that Wall Street is trying not to make the AI bubble a self-fulfilling prophecy because what’s happened is that investors have pulled funds from companies that either aren’t implementing AI or AI companies that are seen as failing.

A sort of AI-cull if you will.

Maybe the theory is that by pruning the rose bush it’s going to bloom more come summer. But surely what’s going to happen is everyone’s incentivised to double down on AI and the bubble becomes more likely instead?

Rather than the purely speculative stock market wagging the dog, what’s really needed is for these AI companies to actually start making money. Like, I know everyone’s hyped about OpenAI’s IPO of SpaceX merging with xAI and doing the same, but this is all conjecture. This is hot air blowing up the balloon, what we need is substance an actual (sustainably) profitable use case for this technology or the thing will pop.

But we’ll see. We’ve got Nvidia’s quarterly earnings coming up which will be a litmus test for the rest of the sector. And then of course we have the secret bi-annual summit of malignant super-sentiences. Oh, you didn’t know about that? Well, of course not, it’s a secret. Yeah, that’s who’s really running things…