Sunday, August 09, 2026
Saturday, August 08, 2026
The Good, the Bad and the Unknowable: The US Economy and the AI Buildout
With apologies to Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood.
Figures current to 7 August 2026, including the July employment report released that morning.
This paper is general information only. It is not financial or investment advice. It does not take account of any person’s objectives, financial situation or needs, and should not be relied on in making an investment decision. The author is not a licensed financial adviser. Figures are drawn from public sources, are current only to the date above, and may contain errors.
Introduction
As we approach the frothy end of the business cycle, there are growing voices predicting a crash, some within months, others within one to three years. Some see a shallow recession like the dot-com crash of 2000, while others see the deep trauma of another 2008 Great Financial Crisis. The purpose of this paper is to allay fears of an immediate catastrophic crash. The US economy is currently healthy, and the danger signs of 2007-08 do not appear to be present.
That last claim carries one significant qualification, and it is why this paper has three parts rather than two. The risk that most resembles 2008 has not disappeared. It has moved out of the banks and into private credit, where nobody can price it.
This paper looks only at the United States, because that is where the AI buildout and its risks sit. The five hyperscalers, the chip designers, the bond market funding the whole thing and the private credit funds and insurers increasingly financing it are American, and the electricity constraint binds in Virginia, Ohio and Texas. The frontier labs are mostly but not all American. For everyone else, including Australia, the exposure is second-hand and runs through four channels: equity markets, where the top ten US names are 41% of the S&P 500 and sit inside almost every global index fund and superannuation balanced option; commodity and capital goods demand; the price of AI services themselves; and the overflow of the buildout itself.
In short, the argument runs as follows. The strength of the US economy makes a deep, GFC-style recession unlikely (the good). The arithmetic of the AI buildout makes disappointing returns on much of that capital investment likely (the bad). And the private credit funds and insurers increasingly funding the buildout are the ones who will absorb those disappointing returns, and who will at some point stop financing the next project (the unknowable). That withdrawal of finance, rather than any single spectacular failure, is the most plausible route from an investment disappointment to a slower economy, and at some point, more likely than not, to a shallow recession. President Trump's trade and immigration policy and the war in Iran bear on the same question and are outside this paper’s scope.
Monday, August 03, 2026
The Morass, and Why the Peace Only Lasted Eight Days
I write about this war once a month, mostly for myself. Writing is how I think. Building an argument on the page is how I work out what might be happening and what might come next. The method earns its keep, but it keeps catching me out, because this war has surprised me more than once.
The cleanest miss was the last one. In June I argued the peace would hold, albeit messily, on two self-enforcing ceilings neither side could afford to break. It broke inside three weeks. I had the deal itself roughly right, having put a negotiated climbdown in May at better than three chances in four, and the memorandum arrived on cue on 17 June. What surprised me was how briefly it lasted, and that Iran discarded a settlement written largely in its favour.
Put the misses together and a pattern shows through. I keep expecting this thing to end. Brevity in March, a deal by summer in May, a durable settlement in June. The one outcome I kept discounting, the long grind, is the one we now have. It is becoming a morass.
There is a second habit sitting underneath that one, and I only caught it while writing this month's piece. I keep assuming the staff work has been done. In March I assumed serious planning lay upstream of the military execution. It did not. This month I assumed an agreement had been tested for workability before it was put to Iran. It had not. Both are the same error in different clothes. I keep crediting the US in this war with more competence than it possesses.
So I will pay less attention this month to what Tehran and Washington say, and more to what they do. This piece is mostly about the memorandum of 17 June, because a peace that died in eight days is the most instructive thing that has happened in this war. Understand why it could not survive and you understand why the morass is stable, and why the next attempt is likely to fail in much the same way. I close with the energy market, which is splitting in two, and with the forces that will shape the months either side of the November midterms.
