Jim Chanos
speaker
353 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 31 Jul
Jim Chanos’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
budgeting and spending was by fairly profitable companies.
What happened in the dot-com era was that they just got too optimistic in terms of how much they needed and order books collapsed.
beginning in late 2000 into 2001.
And so S&P earnings collapsed 40% from the middle of 2000 to the middle of 2001.
They dropped as much as they did during the global financial crisis, which a lot of people find hard to believe.
And so nowadays, we are seeing much, much more concentrated capital spending in the form of build-outs by the hyperscalers, by the so-called neoclouds, and by the AI companies themselves.
So we're seeing a lot more risk in a lot smaller subset of the market.
The broader question, of course, is will there be a return on this investment?
And I think that question remains to be seen.
I pointed out to people, interestingly, the US GDP growth in the 10 years prior to Netscape was exactly the same as it was in the 10 years post-Netscape.
from basically 1996 to 2007.
And S&P profits, which have a long-term sort of trend growth rate of about 6% a year, S&P profits grew 6% in the decade before Netscape, 6% per annum, and they grew 6% per annum in the decade after Netscape.
So for all of the wonderment of the Internet, and it's certainly changed our lives and it brought forth all kinds of new businesses and killed a lot of old businesses, you wouldn't have really kind of noticed it in the aggregate economic or even arguably financial statistics.
And so the question will be, what will AI bring in the form of productivity?
What will it bring in the way of enhanced profitability?
And how much of that is being front-loaded today?
And that's a big question because like the dot-com boom, we have an accounting identity problem.
that follows these CapEx booms, namely that the companies that are spending the money do not expense immediately most of that money that's being spent.
It's capitalized and depreciated over time.
five to 10 years, the companies receiving a lot of that money, the NVIDIAs of the world, the Caterpillar tractors of the world, the utilities, they're receiving it in terms of revenues and profits immediately.
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