Why does the capital have to go anywhere? People just bid less and less for the same assets and prices go down. Margin calls happen and increase seller volume, prices go down further. And so on.
I'm not saying all this will happen. Just that capital doesn't have to "go" anywhere for a crash to occur.
People, or organizations, but mainly people, can just refuse to invest in stuff, parking their money in low-interest bank accounts, or the old style "stuffed into mattresses."
This was the multi-decade problem Japan ran into after its hot economy imploded, and unleashed the "lost decade" (which became decades). It was not a marginal issue, and for year the Japanese government tried everything it could think of to get people to invest in things - to little effect.
Statement: if AI crashes where will the capital go?
Claim: people will just choose to not invest capital at all
Response: that’s the opposite of what we know about supply/demand. When a supply of something (desirable investments), goes down, with demand steady, prices go up
It’s the same thing that happened during zero interest rate environment - huge supply of capital, few places to put it, so it piled into tech which drove up prices
So I guess my answer to “where will the capital go?” is “the next best thing” which drive up prices of that thing
> Claim: people will just choose to not invest capital at all
No. Claim: People will have less capital to invest.
Most portfolios are not cash-heavy. They own assets. If they want to invest in something they borrow against the assets or sell them and get cash. If the assets' prices crash they can't get as much cash for those assets.
Cost of borrowing - which is what you're referencing from the ZIRP era - is another factor into how much people can borrow against assets. But if the assets themselves trade at an average P/E of 20 instead of 40 then people can only borrow half as much money at 1% interest rates.
Could you clarify the question? When everything's going up, it's definitionally not a crash; do you mean something like "where are people going to flee to now/soon, in anticipation of a crash, given how buoyant everything is"?
The banks will start to pull back on AI financing because their risk calculations are going up. That will make the news and people will sell their AI stocks and just put cash in a money market fund or something. Stock price decline confirms the bank’s calculations and now they def. aren’t lending to AI companies. That makes the news and now people are really selling their AI stocks which drives the price down further. The banks react again…
In 2008/9 people became paranoid there was nowhere safe to go and that really screwed things up on top of everything happening in the stock market.
> just put cash in a money market fund or something
So you are predicting everybody will escape into dollars. Which by themselves are extremely risky because the world is at the verge of ditching dollar as global currency.
There was already double digit inflation just because during the pandemics US overprinted dollars in relation to the size of the global economy. Imagine what the inflation will be if the dollar economic domain shrinks by half or more.
This is a great question, and one that drives right to the key issue! (oh god, that sounds like an LLM response, sorry)
Like with the implosion of the Japanese economy, people will just not invest, instead parking their money in low-yield bank accounts. It was, in some cases continues to be, an issue for that country.
They're not definitionally the same. Normally a (stock market) crash is just "everyone's assessment of expected future cash flows goes down, meaning that what everyone owns is less valuable". One thing that can cause people's assessments to drop is "everyone else is withdrawing from it, which I assume means they're assessing it as being much less valuable, so they have information I don't, so I should revise downwards", which can make a self-sustaining feedback loop, but that's certainly not the only possible cause of a crash; I wouldn't even say it was the most likely cause of an AI-bubble crash.
My guesses would be "everyone's assessments go down together because OpenAI et al's predictions of their future revenue are observed to be consistently vastly overinflated vs actual performance, but everyone was previously assuming they were roughly correct" or "some political thing happens which makes OpenAI et al's services obviously much less valuable or makes them much less able to provide services".
You know that the reason things bubble and burst is because speculation outpaces reality at too high a rate, ie : too much "capital" is make up of hopes and dreams.
When reality hits and the numbers make sense, all that hope and dreams go pop.
There is no reality in the market. All prices are speculation, always. If there was any reality involved things like Tesla would crash 3 times already. My question is where the spekulants are going to escape to. I don't think it can be even dollar this time because in this crash dollar most likely will go away as the global currency and the inflation will be devastating.
Ahhhh hehe well there will always be something to speculate on! I don't really know but I know I'm happy I've been hoarding gold. My grandad always drilled it into my mind. Became a habbit over the years!
I wonder what would your granddad say about today's gold prices. And even more curiously how fast they rose in recent years. Gold looks almost as bubbly as the stock market.
