Andrew Ross Sorkin

One of the things that sprung up on the other side of that regulation was an entire new system where effectively private equity firms and other investment firms decided they would start to loan money to businesses, small businesses, large businesses instead of the banks.

Those firms are not regulated like banks, but so much of the lending in America has really moved into what we call the shadow banking system because it's a shadow lending system.

It's almost like the banks without the regulations that the banks historically had.

And so there's one view that it's actually a safer form of lending because it's not attached to the banks in the same way.

But there's another question, which is because we don't have transparency into this marketplace, we don't really know how large the loans are and how interconnected those loans are.

What happens if things turn bad?

Well, there's a couple of risks.

The first is this is not just rich people's money being loaned out.

It's pension money being loaned out.

It's insurance money that's being loaned out.

And because it's so concentrated and so much of the loan process is now moving through what's called private credit or shadow banks, the question is if the economy were to turn south and

And this community decides that they're just not going to make loans.

I mean, that's really part of the issue.

It's not just the loans turn bad, but that they are not going to make new loans.

You could really see how the gears of our economy could slow in a remarkable way.

And that unto itself, I think, has people concerned.

Look, right now, artificial intelligence and the spending on data center, hundreds of billions of dollars a year right now is what is largely keeping our economy afloat.

Jason Furman from Harvard did a study on this.

If you removed the spending on artificial intelligence in America right now, you would have flat GDP in this country practically.

And so you have all of the growth concentrated in this one particular area.