Jacques Mechelany

In 2006, credit markets priced U.S. housing risk as diversified. The subprime market was born. The mathematics looked safe. Reality delivered collapse — and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. In 2025, a strikingly similar illusion has taken hold — this time in artificial intelligence. For now, AI has been largely a capital-expenditure phenomenon, dominated by a very small number of companies such as Nvidia and Oracle — the modern “shovel makers” — building chips and data centers to absorb nearly $1.5 trillion of cumulative investment by a handful of hyperscalers such as Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon. This unprecedented spending wave has driven stock prices to unimaginable heights.