Jim Chanos

And that's a red flag.

Well, similar to my concerns about private credit owning regulated investing subsidiaries, one of the things that has caught my eye that is concerning now is we're starting to see the advent of

of so-called SPVs, which are entities, and this comes from the Enron era and the global financial crisis, entities that are specifically set up to hold assets, borrow against those assets, and take it off balance sheets.

So you just showed equity investment as opposed to the massive amount of debt that's being taken on.

And that, again, is something that worries us because

If there's one sort of consistent theme that we're seeing amongst the players that know this the best, Nvidia, Microsoft, companies like that, is they seem to now be willing to do anything to get the actual equipment off their books and either keep it in the footnotes or...

use innovative financing to sell it.

And I think they're concerned about depreciating lives and some of the accounting on this, as well as just the immense capital needs that they don't want to put directly on their balance sheets.

Look, I mean, it's driving the market, right?

AI is the displacement of this cycle, right?

If the internet was the displacement idea of the 90s, certainly it's AI right now.

And if AI goes, there's not going to be a lot of places to hide because it's so embedded right now in the psyche of investors.

So we better hope it works.

Because if not, there might be some disappointment down the road.

So the problem in 2000, 2001 was basically, wasn't really vendor financing.

As I said, that was all in about $100 billion over five years.

The real problem was double and triple ordering of equipment, where people put in orders for routers and network equipment and capacity, and then...

Basically, all at once, in late 2000, early 2001, they pulled back.

We don't need all these routers.

We don't need all these switches.