Below are some of the most interesting things I came across this week. Click here to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter and get this post delivered to your inbox each Saturday morning.
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It was recently suggested that “unsinkable retail investors” are propping up the stock market. Peter Atwater writes, “The concern that I have with an ‘unsinkable’ thinking isn’t just that it has become an irrefutable fact and saturating belief, but what it now suggests with respect to risk taking. It is moral hazard at its worst.”
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One thing that is undeniably propping up the economy right now is massive capex spending by Big Tech. In fact, “The proportion of spending on data centers is higher than the spending on telecom was in the late 90s,” notes Liz Thomas.
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However, it doesn’t appear to be having the desired effects on the economy, at least not as of yet. “Substantially-higher capital investment that yields identical labor productivity implies that total-factor productivity growth has been substantially inferior to that observed during the dot-com era,” reports Cameron Crise.
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And if the Dotcom example is anything to go by, the prospect of it paying off for investors doesn’t look very good. As Mike Green points out, “Despite internet usage growing 1,000-fold, industry revenues were cut in half. The internet transformed society exactly as promised — but the investors who funded that transformation were often wiped out. AI is likely to follow the same economic arc.”
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For this reason, some are starting to think that the stock market may be “sinkable” after all. “One problem underscored by GPT-5’s underwhelming rollout is that it exploded one of the most cherished principles of the AI world, which is that ‘scaling up’ would bring the grail of AGI ever closer to reality… But if AI won’t scale up, most if not all that money will be wasted,” writes Michael Hiltzik.
