You mean "Listen to [someone who started on Wall Street at Lehman Brothers, joined PayPal in its earliest days and worked alongside Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and eventually became a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley] argue why AI probably isn't a bubble".
Funny how this different framing of the exact same person provides a completely opposite expectation of their incentives behind commenting on whether AI valuations are a bubble.
We don't let bubbles pop anymore. We print money and borrow from the future so that no one loses money on their homes and retirement accounts. The GFC changed the rules.
It looks less like capitalism and more like socialism for the rich, marketed as free markets.
Print money. Push most of it into cheap credit for giant corporations and asset owners. Let a little trickle into the real economy so ordinary people feel temporary relief. Then let inflation quietly do the dirty work.
The public pays through higher prices, weaker savings, and future debt.
The powerful collect the upside.
That is the game: privatize the profits, socialize the losses, and call it capitalism.
And all of this is legal under the disguise of "protecting the economy for regular folks", and they can keep doing it repeatedly.
It worked. The only people upset about it are young people who don't vote. If young people don't want a continual wealth transfer from them to the old, they need to start voting. That's been the case since 2008, and here we are a generation later.
Irrational exuberance rarely transitions to a rational drawn down. The minute the first selfish-actor flood-liquidates, everyone else will too. That's now runs work.
One thing I have come to realize, is that worrying about bubbles will keep you poor.
If everyone is in the bubble and it pops, everyone is in the same boat, so you’re not really going to be poorer than your peers by comparison.
If it’s not a bubble and you are wrong, you will fall way behind everyone else and just watch people get richer and richer doing the exact same thing you should have done.
Also, just because something is a bubble doesn’t mean it has to end in a devastating pop. Sometimes bubbles expand and then just get diffused. The exponential rise stops and prices plateau, but it just becomes a new normal and things stagnate for a while before resuming normal upward growth.
Ask Warren Buffet how concerned he was of "missing" on bubbles... He got richer than pretty much everybody else by just avoiding bubbles and then buying assets at fire sale prices when they inevitably popped.
Chamath says Warren Buffett outperformed the $SPX by 2 times pre-2000’s because he used "insider info".
Berkshire Hathaway completely exited its investment in Paytm (One97 Communications) in November 2023. This divestment occurred just two months prior to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) initiating its strict regulatory and KYC-related crackdowns on Paytm Payments Bank in early 2024.
No, Warren Buffet became so rich because he was making deals to pick up stock at favorable prices the public didn’t have access to. You will not be Warren Buffet just by buying after stocks crash.
> If everyone is in the bubble and it pops, everyone is in the same boat, so you’re not really going to be poorer than your peers by comparison.
> If it’s not a bubble and you are wrong, you will fall way behind everyone else and just watch people get richer and richer doing the exact same thing you should have done.
I don't get? First scenario, you get richer vs. the average and in the second you gt poorer. So in total you average out? I don't see how not participating makes you poorer in average.
> Sometimes bubbles expand and then just get diffused.
That's not what a bubble is. A financial bubble is defined by the "burst" at the end.
Normal people generally won't be able to beat professionals in the "market timing game". So when Joe Sixpack decides to sell off his index funds with intent to buy back in at a lower price, he's usually making a mistake. Staying invested in the market is a better choice for most investors because being in cash is about -2%/year EV whereas being in stocks is about +6%/year EV.
There is literally nothing creative about circumventing existing regulations. By definition of there already being rules in place to prevent them, the pump methods being used are already a known quantity. That those safeguards are being bypassed is just boring old corruption.
The wrong lessons were were learnt in 2008 after no individual suffered any negative consequences for their part in causing horrible losses for a lot of people.
Listen to the author of “A Brief History of Financial Bubbles” argue why it probably isn’t a bubble:
https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/260347/s/233172.rss
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/conversations-with-col...
https://open.spotify.com/show/0Cj2lIpGxkrw1RFVIPTa6a?si=f41c...
Can you please summarize his argument?
The argument is, as I understand it:
* Valuation of the sp500, the hyperscalers and Nvidia is (mostly) reasonable based on earnings
* Build out of infrastructure is demand-driven, hyperscalers are not building just for future demand that would not materialize
* OpenAI, anthropic & co can be overvalued but that does not mean there's a systemic bubble
I think this underestimates contagion effects and the fact that demand appears to be subsidized and may disappear quickly, but it's just MHO.
4 replies →
You mean "Listen to [someone who started on Wall Street at Lehman Brothers, joined PayPal in its earliest days and worked alongside Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and eventually became a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley] argue why AI probably isn't a bubble".
Funny how this different framing of the exact same person provides a completely opposite expectation of their incentives behind commenting on whether AI valuations are a bubble.
[flagged]
We don't let bubbles pop anymore. We print money and borrow from the future so that no one loses money on their homes and retirement accounts. The GFC changed the rules.
It looks less like capitalism and more like socialism for the rich, marketed as free markets.
Print money. Push most of it into cheap credit for giant corporations and asset owners. Let a little trickle into the real economy so ordinary people feel temporary relief. Then let inflation quietly do the dirty work.
The public pays through higher prices, weaker savings, and future debt.
The powerful collect the upside.
That is the game: privatize the profits, socialize the losses, and call it capitalism.
And all of this is legal under the disguise of "protecting the economy for regular folks", and they can keep doing it repeatedly.
except the last bubble pop hit fast and hard with post covid inflation.
It worked. The only people upset about it are young people who don't vote. If young people don't want a continual wealth transfer from them to the old, they need to start voting. That's been the case since 2008, and here we are a generation later.
6 replies →
oh yea good way to stay out of market and retire like a poor person.
It’s never going to happen because too many people want it to happen.
> If this is a bubble... The pop stage will be devastating...
Why? It could be sudden. It could be slow and gradual. I've seen no reason it needs to be one versus the other.
Irrational exuberance rarely transitions to a rational drawn down. The minute the first selfish-actor flood-liquidates, everyone else will too. That's now runs work.
but this isn't "irrational exuberance", literally everyone I know paying and kind of attention has "rational dread".
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But where else will people put their money?
6 replies →
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Because it is deliberately extracting cash from Mom and Pop into the robber baron's wallets?
Okay? Why does that mean a devastating pop?
15 replies →
Why would that pop the bubble?
Robber Barrons existed from like 1860 through 1915 and extracted the wealth of many people, including Native American tribe lands.
Like this shit can keep going until we decide enough is enough and actually change our society.
1 reply →
I mean, isn't the definition of a bubble that it pops quickly? If it slowly loses value over time, its not really a bubble.
> isn't the definition of a bubble that it pops quickly?
There is no consistent definition of a bubble. We have no fundamental reason current valuations have to collapse suddenly.
3 replies →
One thing I have come to realize, is that worrying about bubbles will keep you poor.
If everyone is in the bubble and it pops, everyone is in the same boat, so you’re not really going to be poorer than your peers by comparison.
If it’s not a bubble and you are wrong, you will fall way behind everyone else and just watch people get richer and richer doing the exact same thing you should have done.
Also, just because something is a bubble doesn’t mean it has to end in a devastating pop. Sometimes bubbles expand and then just get diffused. The exponential rise stops and prices plateau, but it just becomes a new normal and things stagnate for a while before resuming normal upward growth.
Ask Warren Buffet how concerned he was of "missing" on bubbles... He got richer than pretty much everybody else by just avoiding bubbles and then buying assets at fire sale prices when they inevitably popped.
https://x.com/Mr_Derivatives/status/2022796755621060695
Chamath says Warren Buffett outperformed the $SPX by 2 times pre-2000’s because he used "insider info".
Berkshire Hathaway completely exited its investment in Paytm (One97 Communications) in November 2023. This divestment occurred just two months prior to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) initiating its strict regulatory and KYC-related crackdowns on Paytm Payments Bank in early 2024.
I think Warren has been doing insider trading.
No, Warren Buffet became so rich because he was making deals to pick up stock at favorable prices the public didn’t have access to. You will not be Warren Buffet just by buying after stocks crash.
> If everyone is in the bubble and it pops, everyone is in the same boat, so you’re not really going to be poorer than your peers by comparison.
> If it’s not a bubble and you are wrong, you will fall way behind everyone else and just watch people get richer and richer doing the exact same thing you should have done.
I don't get? First scenario, you get richer vs. the average and in the second you gt poorer. So in total you average out? I don't see how not participating makes you poorer in average.
> Sometimes bubbles expand and then just get diffused.
That's not what a bubble is. A financial bubble is defined by the "burst" at the end.
Normal people generally won't be able to beat professionals in the "market timing game". So when Joe Sixpack decides to sell off his index funds with intent to buy back in at a lower price, he's usually making a mistake. Staying invested in the market is a better choice for most investors because being in cash is about -2%/year EV whereas being in stocks is about +6%/year EV.
[flagged]
There is literally nothing creative about circumventing existing regulations. By definition of there already being rules in place to prevent them, the pump methods being used are already a known quantity. That those safeguards are being bypassed is just boring old corruption.
The wrong lessons were were learnt in 2008 after no individual suffered any negative consequences for their part in causing horrible losses for a lot of people.