저자: RebelCapitalist진행자추정/출연자미상 · 외국인
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AI 설비투자 버블 우려: 엔비디아·블랙록 등 대형 자금 흐름이 현금흐름 적자 기업의 부채에 의존하는 폰지 구조이며 신용 헤지 수요가 증가 중. 1987·1999 유사성 언급. 30년물 국채금리가 2007년 이후 최고치를 기록했으나, 장기채 약세 전환 인사(Lacy Hunt) 등을 근거로 금리 하락(채권 강세) 가능성을 시사. 명확한 매매 권유는 없음.
다듬은 글
There's no turning around for BlackRock. There's no Certainly no turning around for Nvidia. Nvidia is all in on this as well. So, I think it's gotten too far to the point that there just is no You can't be honest about what's happened so far, but you also there is no exit ramp for them that doesn't look like a catastrophe for somebody like BlackRock and Larry Fink.
Yeah, it's turned into a Ponzi scheme. So, they're just kind of the Jenga. It's There's just the one Jenga piece and that's it. Yeah, but again, to be clear, that Jenga piece doesn't make money. The business model of that one Jenga piece is By the way, it's propping up Nvidia as well. Everyone talks about the profits of Nvidia, but all of their profits, which are real, but they're coming from entities that don't have a business model.
So, let's go back to the the commercial real estate thing. So, because that's something everyone can get their head around. And you've got Nvidia, they're basically building the office buildings. That's what they do. So, what they're saying is, "Hey, we've got all of these companies that need office space.
And so, BlackRock, why don't you lend to them and then we'll build the So, they'll pay us to build the building and they can either use that as office space or they can lend it out to someone else, right? The problem there is if the person that's buying the office, if their business is cash flow negative, they're not going to be able to make those payments to the BlackRock or whoever the lender is.
And if they're buying that commercial real estate to lend it out to someone else, they're going to be lending it out to someone that also has an uneconomic business model. And at some point in time that there's just no cash flow in order to service basically all of the debt and it's like the whole house of cards comes crashing down in on itself.
Well, it's it's worse that, George, because in the in the short run, the debt is the substitute for the cash flow, right? Because in the in early stage of anything, cash flow always is a small and it's a little part of it. So, you borrow in in the when you don't have the cash flow coming in, you borrow hoping that, you know, exponential revenue growth and eventually over time, you self-fund and you can pay back the debt.
But again, that the the Jenga piece I think is a really good analogy because it is cash flow negative. It's actually moving the burrito further and further away. So, instead of getting them closer and closer to the goal line, it actually pushes them further and further toward the edge, which is I think one of the reasons why again that I used the term desperate, which might be too strong, but maybe it's not.
Uh but, the the key here is you turn off the debt and what ends up happening. That's when the tower falls down because there's nothing holding it up except for a fire hose of debt coming in. Which is why, you know, this announcement from Nvidia and BlackRock and all the rest of them, I think that's what it really I mean, they realized the danger here is if we don't have an unlimited for source of funds over the next couple years, they're cooked.
They're toast. Yeah, exactly. Another way I like to describe it is let's assume you've got this 21-year-old kid who has this startup and the startup is likely going to fail and currently the startup is, let's say, hemorrhaging $100,000 a month. But, the CEO of this kid's startup is the kid's dad and he pays and he pays his dad 10 grand a month, right?
So, what's happening here and the dad is Nvidia, right? And the kid's startup is OpenAI or Anthropic or any of these other companies. So, they're sitting there looking at the dad and saying, "Oh my gosh, you're making $10,000 a month and your expenses are only $2,000 a month. You're a fantastic credit risk." But, then they don't but that's that's where the analysis stops and they don't sit back and like, "Well, wait a minute.
Where's his 10 grand a month coming from?" "Oh, it's coming from his kid's business that is flushing $100,000 a month down or losing $100,000 a month and they only have 6 months of runway. That that that's that's the easiest way that you can, I think, explain or understand what's going on here. And that leads us into the credit default swaps and the growing anxiety in the credit cycle, right, George?
Because credit default I mean a credit default swap on a company like Meta. You're Meta's not going to go bankrupt. That's not really the point here. You use a credit default swap on Meta as sort of a hedging tool for downside risk more broadly or more generally. And so what we've seen over the last month and a half or so, going back to early July, I think it was right about when it turned, is that again, like you said, CNBC is not asking the questions, but Wall Street and Wall Street investors are.
And then what they're continuing to find is, you know, all of these vulnerabilities. Therefore, the demand for hedging has risen incrementally and in some places risen pretty quickly. Again, we don't want to get don't want to overstate it. It's not exploding. It's not like the world the market thinks the world's going to fall about to part tomorrow.
But what it really does identify is a behavioral change in how people view the debt cycle. But but before it was, you want some money? I get how much money do you want? I'm going to I'll I'll write you a blank check for whatever you want. Now they're saying, okay, hold up here. Not only do I not only going to ask some questions and maybe limit the funds.
I'm actually going to start thinking about hedging my exposure to you because as this continues to go along, the numbers get worse, the situation looks more dicey. We keep hearing things that don't pan out in reality. Now you've got this desperation move by BlackRock and Nvidia. I mean, it's just these questions continue to pile up.
So you can understand why the credit in terms of the credit cycle, the it's a very different it's a very clear behavioral change. Yeah, and I mean, when you look at credit default swaps in times of stress or you look at credit spreads, it's not like they go from here to here in one day. They always start off
They always start off with a trend and as the trend just gets worse and worse and worse. And I mean, if you just look at the parallels with every single CapEx bubble that we have had in the last, what, 300 years or something? I mean, they always play out the same way. And there's a reason they play out the same way.
It's because we're all human beings and we are hardwired today the exact same way they're hardwired during the railroads. In the exact same way they were hardwired during the dot com bust. It It's We're We're just It's all the same software or whatever else going on in our brain. And that's why these things play out the exact same way every time.
I guess the end game is is different. But as far as how the cycles play out, it it's just it's just put it on repeat. And you know, it's like that uh who was it? Churchill that said, "People who don't study history are doomed to repeat history." Or something like that. I think it was um Santayana. Yeah, I mean it's the exact same thing here.
And you know, the problem is timing this thing. And the problem is this can go on as far as an investor. You can't go out there and just buy puts on Meta or buy puts on Nvidia or something like that. Because you don't know if this thing goes up another 100% before it starts to go down. Uh another way to say that is you don't know if we're in 1998, 99, or 2000, even though you know how this movie ends.
And And that's what makes it so challenging. Well, have you noticed too or at least uh maybe it's a sort of an anecdotal type of development here. You've seen more and more people start to challenge the stock market. I mean the credit cycle's one thing and the credit cycle is in many ways driving or at least it's the key risk to the stock market.
We have seen I at least I've noticed and maybe it's just a sample bias. But I've noticed more people who have come out saying, you know, yeah, this thing we're getting close to the top and this thing's going to go down. I agree with you. Nobody can ever pick the top. You have no idea how long it's going to run.
But you do see some clues that, okay, more people the more people recognize that this is a bubble and it has a bubble pattern, the greater the chances as people wake up from the bubble pattern that it does end up leading to the other side in the bust. I mean we've heard Michael Burry came out uh, was it last week?
Said, "Hey, this I'm starting to get worried about a 1987-style repeat here. There's a lot of similarities." I forget who else came out recently. Oh, Norway, the sovereign wealth fund just today as we're recording on August 11th, the sovereign wealth fund said, "You know, we're now stress testing our portfolio because we realize we can't get out of the stock market assuming that it goes into a bust and we think if the AI bubble pops, we'll lose 35% or so." But, and then the CEO of the Norway fund said, "You know, it wouldn't be impossible if if our entire portfolio disappears, all two trillion of the biggest sovereign wealth fund in history." Um, so I it seems to me, maybe I'm wrong and I I really want to get your what your perspective is on this.
More and more people are starting to sound off on the marketplace as it gets further and further down this road. My gut is that would insinuate we're only in the eighth inning and we're only at 1999 because I think if we were in 2000, the parabolic move would be so extreme that the Michael Burrys of the world would possibly capitulate.
Maybe not Michael Burry cuz he he's a bearish guy, he's kind of like I am. But, you know what I mean? It it's it's what I can liken it to is Lacy Hunt. I'm sure you know who Dr. Lacy Hunt is and he's been a notorious bond bull for the last 40 years, something like that. And he just came out recently, like maybe two or three weeks ago, and turned into a bond bear.
And when I see stuff like that, I'm like, "Hmm, maybe I should be buying long into the curve." You know, we're specifically talking about Treasuries. Because if you have the one last standing bull and all of a sudden he turns into a bear, there's no more sellers. Like, all everyone who's going to sell has sold and then even if there's not that many buyers, those are the only guys left and then usually you see yields go down.
So, I could take that both ways. I could I could take that as the market's kind of waking up and I could also take that as because there's a lot of people waking up, then there's not a clear path and and you're likely going to go up or we haven't hit that point where you just go parabolic before the blow-off top.
Yeah, which makes a lot of I mean like again, we're not trying to time the market nor do we recommend anybody trying to do so. Uh but I think it did you know, there's so many similarities and that's you know, let's talk about interest rate. I mean since you segued into interest rate, let's talk about interest rates here for a minute because um it's another big important topic.
As you know, George or maybe you don't know, the 30-year long bond hit its highest yield since 2007. So we got a 20-year high in the 30-year long bond which to many people means something, I guess. So there's this idea that because long end rates are rising, it must mean that long end rates must continue to rise.
Um yes, you can supply whatever explanation or excuse that you want to throw in there. It's, you know, the US government is getting broker by the second or even the microsecond these days which is absolutely the case. Nobody argues that. Or interest Or oil prices. Yeah, exactly. So long bond rates are going up, therefore something.
Yeah, it's therefore it's a signal that the end that all the gold bugs have been talking about and the Austrians for the last 40 years is upon us or something like that. Instead of just, oh, inflation and growth expectations went up and it's easily explained by that. But that goes back to what I was saying is you have all of the people in the mainstream media and even like the normies, like the talking heads on CNBC and the people in the alternative media space, call it FinTwit, they're all like freaking out, like having a meltdown that the 30-year got up to whatever 527 or something like that.
And but you combine that with Dr. Lacy Hunt being that 40, you know, he was like the quintessential, he's like the poster child. He was like the Michael Saylor of of interest rates going down, you know, or being long treasuries. So, just think about that. Michael Saylor, think about him being bearish on Bitcoin.
I mean, I would want to buy Bitcoin in that case. So, you have that combined with this overwhelming narrative that everyone, everyone is hyper, hyper bearish on the long bond, and what that tells me is it's likely going to go down in terms of yield. thing that concerns me about that, cuz I actually looked at that for my own portfolio, Jeff.
I I saw I mean, all of this pessimism. I was like, man, maybe I should maybe I should take a position on the long side.
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