David Uberti

There's been this sort of deer-in-the-headlights moment on Wall Street of what people should do, and it has left the market in this very herky-jerky, trigger-happy mode.

So it just sort of speaks to how this particular sub-stack post played into an existing trend, and in many cases exacerbated that trend.

So Citrini Research is a small research firm.

They do macro and stock research, which they have published on Substack for the last couple of years or so.

They're not as widely known as a lot of the research outfits that we tend to follow, but they have a really sizable following on Substack.

And in fact, they're one of the largest financial blogs on Substack.

And this went more viral than anything else that they've done previously.

The scenario at a high level is that the sort of rapid advancement in adoption of AI will lead to this sort of cascading dynamic of job losses, disinvestment, and a race to the bottom in prices that ultimately leads to mass unemployment among white-collar workers.

They said these agents will just sort of exist in the background of all of the apps that you or I use, and they will basically make decisions either autonomously or semi-autonomously to reduce the friction of something like ordering food to your house, to make sure that you get the lowest possible price at all times.

And then their hypothesis is that it will actually snowball into the broader economy because if you have mass layoffs among white collar workers, those folks tend to make a lot of money.

There will be in turn a huge decline in U.S.

overall consumption.

in the economy, and then all sorts of financial institutions, whether they are private lenders, mainstream banks, payment processors, mortgage lenders, all of the financial firms that sort of exist around that space, those firms will also suffer as well.

So they raise the question that this could also sort of lead to a financial contagion of sorts, in addition to an economic malaise.

Basically the ghost GDP idea is that all of this innovation will help create wealth in the form of new GDP, new stuff, new value that we create in the economy, but it won't actually go back into the quote unquote real economy in any meaningful way.

Basically, all of this wealth will accrue to people or companies who win this sort of winner-take-all situation.

And the benefits of that, the financial benefits of that, won't be filtered elsewhere.

You have DoorDash, which is your food delivery app.

You have Visa and MasterCard, which are some of those payment processors that take a cut of each transaction.

Salesforce, Zscaler, CrowdStrike, which are all different types of software firms.