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The Second Derivative: Why No One Understands the AI Boom

substack.com · 6,760 words · saved by 1 readers

The market misremembers 2008. That same blind spot sits at the center of the AI boom.

Ask a portfolio manager what caused the 2008 mortgage crisis and you will hear a tidy causal chain: lax underwriting produced loans that should never have been made, home prices crashed, borrowers found themselves underwater, they defaulted, and the securities written on top of those loans detonated. Prices fell, therefore borrowers defaulted. It has the great virtue of sounding obvious. It is also, as a matter of sequence, wrong. It is the same error the market is making right now about the AI boom. The subprime machine did not run on prices. It ran on the change in prices, and more…

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