Azeem Azhar

But within a decade, the loan book of GMAC was the equivalent of half a percent of US GDP.

Wow.

So vendor

financing doesn't always have to end badly what it does do is it creates a new set of risks for the participants to behave badly and then we so we need some transparency right to see what's going on between these these relationships uh how real are they are there things that are being hidden we've got that experience from enron we've got that experience from worldcom uh and we're

For me, this is exactly an area where we need the kind of inspection that journalists have been doing.

But right now, when I look at it, I think, well, yeah, it could go bad, but it hasn't.

And it seems like it's got a little while to go before it might.

I think it's going to present all sorts of risks that we can't map and that we will be behind the curve as we were during the global financial crisis on bond rating agencies not rating these buckets of terrible mortgages correctly.

The thing that strikes me about a lot of these deals is that

They are at this point still relatively transparent.

There is a little bit of economic logic.

It's not so much about NVIDIA saying, you're going to buy my chips from me and then I'm going to give you money to do it.

What's happening here is that NVIDIA has the strongest balance sheet and it also has the monopoly on these chips and it really wants to sell a lot.

So in a way, this is a...

almost a logical way of them doing this, particularly as OpenAI, which is the one that needs most of these, is such a young company, it's massively loss-making, and it doesn't have the kind of balance sheet that lends itself to buying these off the cap.

Now, look, that is a very, very positive, Pollyannish reading of what's going on.

But it also is one that you might end up with if you were trying to think,

How do we make sure we don't run out of fuel to meet our customer demand?

I mean, I'm not sure what else you would do if demand is as hot as people claim it is.

Right.