[Spooky23]

This. The OpenAI grift is to make itself too big to fail. They are playing a game of chicken ahead of the election circus. Trump must keep the market alive until November. Nvidia, Micron, Oracle, Microsoft are cooked when and if they pop.

[freakynit]

Is there a term for such a recurring cycle in which speculative bubbles form, institutions and governments collaborate/collude to sustain them, and when the system finally reaches a breaking point the bubble collapses... leaving the public to absorb the losses while those responsible largely walk away with their pay and bonuses intact?

[hedora]

Usually just "bubble", since it's so common.

This one is unusual in that the government started bailing out the AI companies last year. Usually, it waits until the bubble pops, and then starts the bail outs.

That's standard operating procedure for Trump though.

He did the same thing in 2016-19 with the zero interest rate policy + tax cuts even though the economy was strong. Any macroeconomics book (or NPR station during those years) will tell you that doing that creates short-term economic growth, but sets the next administration up for [hyper-]inflation.

Of course, that happened, and those same books go on to say "and, usually, because inflation takes a bit to kick in, the next president will be blamed. This is why we have an independent Fed".

So, this time around, he's trying to pull the same crap by dismantling the Fed, and, until then, lean hard into deficit spending to keep unemployment low. Last year, money went to data centers, and domestic paramilitary actions and prison build-outs. This year, we have those things and a new pointless forever war.

However, it's not working the same way as it did last time. He's done so much other collateral damage that we're in a "boomcession" where the economic indicators become untethered from reality. So, they show growth, but people's quality of life, spending power, job security, and so on all decrease.

For example, a piece of the GDP is "how much does your bank screw you per year on your checking account?". This is treated like discretionary spending, and it's gone up from a few hundred a year to over $2000 in 2025. That increase counts as economic growth, instead of institutionalized theft.

Medical spending increases drove all the US's GDP growth last quarter. The quarter before that, it was spending on AI datacenters that's backed by junk loans and federal dollars.

Anyway, I don't have an answer for your question better than "bubble", but the current economic cycle is not what you described. It is a "boomcession". As far as I can tell, it's a new class of economic disaster, at least in the US.

[freakynit]

Thank you for such a good and detailed explanation. Loved reading through it. And I like the new word: "boomcession" (not the effects of it tho).

[freakynit]

Submitted "boomcession" to urban dictionary (in review)... sorry, couldn't credit you as there was no place to do so.

[freakynit]

It's live: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Boomcession

[hedora]

Not my term: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-boomcession-why-every...

It's nice to indirectly contribute to the Urban Dictionary though.

(Not sure if the link is the original source of the term; but it's before me in the chain.)

[freakynit]

Hmm... but as you said, good that it got added in urban dict. :)

[mrguyorama]

The term is Capitalism.

What did you think the "Capital" in capitalism referred to? It doesn't refer to you and me

[df2dfs]

We need to create a special place where people who ‘get it’ congregate.

Sadly this place is full of noise and people who don’t get the big picture - leading to the down voting of posts and continual drowning out of stuff closer to the truth by noise and hysteria.

[trinsic2]

IMHO everyone needs to cancel there subscriptions with all of the ai products until stuff blows over. I don't trust anyone in this industry.There is probably one person or one group behind all of these AI companies that just needs to keep the engine going until they figure out how to replace everyone with bots that can do the dirty work.

[jitl]

there’s a lot of financial incentive to start ur own lab if u can, and invest in as many as u are able