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by lbrito 18 days ago
High growth scenario and medium growth scenario (Graph 2). I feel like an idiot asking - aren't we missing some, or at least one, scenario? Is "medium growth" for the next 4 years really the worst people can think of?
7 comments

Financial news tends to be written for people who can fill in a lot of blanks themselves.
Can't agree more, tech and finance bros have a lot in similar except when it comes to business.
Essentially yes? The stock market operates entirely on the assumption that the lines will keep going up. As soon as they flatten the whole thing collapses onto itself.
Flatten would mean there is a profitable business model. It's been years since people have been too tired of repeatedly asking "where will the profit come from?" with no answer. This shit has exactly one direction it will end and it's not flat or up.
Flatten plus debt is bad.

Debt presumes future growth.

The source article says (in a way that I can understand might be a bit non-obvious) that it's analyzing the AI buildout from the perspective of the people who are participating in it. Someone who believes there'll be less than "medium growth" would probably not be buying hyperscaler bonds right now regardless of their precise estimate. They discuss the tail risks if the whole investment thesis is wrong at the end.
Hmm. Perhaps too similar to pre-GFC when the ratings agencies' models never accounted for scenarios where home prices went down at the national level.
> Is "medium growth" for the next 4 years really the worst people can think of?

At this point anything less than "medium growth" will crash the economy. We'll have bigger problems if that happens (think 2000 or 2008)

Right... So since it's a big problem, shouldn't we at least be considering it as a possibility so that we can minimize the impact?
No no no… that’s unecessary. Because it won’t happen.
Can't you see how much money is being pumped into this lunacy? Of course it's going to succeed. Graphs for failire are such a bummer too and are bad for the economy...
if growth doesn't materialize, then the infrastructure build out plays out exactly like the dot com bubble. the biggest difference this time around is the earnings. if those fall, the rest crubmles.
How are the earnings different this time? Can you add any color to that?
In the dot-com situation earnings "didn't matter" as long as there was growth. We[1] all believed profit would come eventually. The lesson learned from that experience was that earning do sort of matter. It turns out there is a limit to selling dollars for dimes. Since then revenue, profit and unit-economics ("fundamentals") have gotten almost as much attention as they deserve.

[1] a broad and poorly defined group of "we" - typically investors and tech-bro types.

That's not quite the lesson.

Earnings did come, and the outcome of the internet include Google, Amazon, and others -- several of the ten biggest companies in the world.

In 2000, there was no sane way to predict who the success stories versus failures would be, timeliness, or otherwise.

AI will be a big change. We don't know how big, when, or who the losers and winners will be yet. Everything could be grossly overvalued or undervalued. We'll only know in hindsight.

Has anybody worked out quantitatively whether the total dot-com boom was a decent investment in hindsight?
There is no shot that current AI tech comes even close to being as influential as the Internet. What we have right now is useless for getting anything productive done because it's so unreliable.
Does anybody know how much AI is earning?