저자: PeterSchiff · 외국인
요약 보기
AI 설비투자 붐은 자본적지출로 가려진 버블이며, 하이퍼스케일러들이 현금에서 부채 차입으로 전환해 채권시장 금리를 밀어올리고 있다. AI 장비는 2~3년이면 낙후돼 감가상각이 과소평가되고 있다. 메타·구글·스페이스X 채권은 국채 대비 금리 프리미엄이 1~2%p에 불과해 매력이 없으며, 시장 붕괴 시 저가 매수가 낫다. 비트코인은 6만 달러 아래 지지선이 깨지면 5만, 나아가 2~3만 달러까지 하락할 것으로 전망하며, 스트래티지(Saylor)의 주식 매각을 비트코인 매도 회피의 증거로 해석한다. 전반적으로 시장 대폭락을 예상한다.
다듬은 글
Sure, there's going to be demand for AI, but is it worth the money that's going in to all this computer equipment? And they're just going to have to keep on replacing it because it becomes obsolete and it's an arms race. You know, nobody really is thinking about the end game. Everybody is just trying to get in on the action.
Nobody everybody wants to outspend everybody else, keep up with the Joneses, and at some point the bond market is going to break. There's a limit to how much money people want to lend to Meta and and Google and and and and and uh SpaceX. But, the Fed can't do anything about it. Like, we can we can change interest rates, but how does that affect a black worker versus a white worker or a Hispanic worker?
I mean, they're they're they're all the same. I mean, we have, you know, a couple of levers, right? Print money, don't print money, cut rates, raise rates. There's no, you know, lever that we can pull for African Americans. There is no specific policy that can be targeted. Why not just tell her that?
Why not just level with her and say, "Look, you know, this is not the place where He's afraid. He's afraid to to speak up. You know, nobody wants to criticize anybody for asking these ridiculous questions. But, even better, what I would love to see Kevin Warsh do is say, "You know what, Congresswoman, I appreciate that you're concerned about black workers and you know, the problems that they're facing.
Why don't you do something about it legislatively? Why don't you start repealing a lot of the laws that Congress has passed over the decades that are disadvantaging African-American workers. They are being disproportionately impacted by all the war on poverty, great society, welfare programs uh starting from the 1960s.
And all of the uh laws, the anti-discrimination laws that have been passed have backfired. Everything the government has done to help African Americans has backfired and harmed them. It's got nothing to do with the Fed. Yeah, I mean the Fed harms everybody, right? They're an equal opportunity harmer.
Their bad monetary policy and their inflation, sure. And you can say, well, if blacks are disproportionately poor and middle class, then maybe they disproportionately suffer relative relative you know, from inflation, which may be true. But there's no way that the Fed could target that relief to the African Americans, right?
It It It is It They could just paint with one big brush. But if Congress actually repealed a lot of these laws that, you know, maybe they were well-intentioned. I'll I'll give them that they had well intentions. But, you know, the road to hell is paved with with good intentions. And in this case, it's the African Americans who are in hell as a result of that well-intentioned legislation.
Now, in many cases, it wasn't well-intentioned. The actual purpose of the legislation was to trap African Americans in poverty to secure their votes so that they can hold out an escape from poverty uh you know, kind of as as bribes or to get African Americans to depend on government handouts so that they'll keep voting for the people who are writing the checks that they're cashing, right?
The government breaking your leg so that you'll rely on them for a crutch. So, in many cases, again, it isn't good intentions. It's evil intentions. But in some cases, yeah, I'm sure there are members of Congress who are foolish enough to actually think that these programs are going to help. Think about that for a second.
If AI really is the future, then the biggest question isn't whether people will use it. It's whether the company spending hundreds of billions can ever earn that money back. If you're enjoying this kind of deep market analysis, make sure to subscribe and let us know in the comments. Do you think the AI boom is creating the next big bubble or is this just the beginning?
Well, they don't help. They hurt. That's why, you know, conservatives and libertarians are opposed to them. Now, they could also be opposed to them for constitutional and moral reasons, but they're also opposed to them because they know they don't work. They They understand the unintended consequences that the left completely ignores.
So, Walsh would have had an opportunity to shove that in her face, but, you know, he doesn't want to do that. Anyway, um I'm going to talk more about uh the congressional testimony on my second podcast later this week because then we're going to have uh the uh the Senate uh version and we'll have the full market reaction uh to to what's been said.
Couple more points I wanted to make though in this podcast. One, I want to talk about this AI bubble. And I've been talking about the AI bubble for a while, and I happened to watch a George Gammon video that, you know, kind of uh made this point. And so, I wanted to credit George cuz I did watch it and, you know, if you see this video on YouTube, you could check it out because he has some really good graphs that really show this.
And I'm not, you know, putting up any graphs in my podcast. But, you know, a lot of people say, "Oh, there's no AI bubble. It's nothing like the dot-com bubble." And they look at companies, you know, like Nvidia, and they say, "Look, you know, their PEs aren't that bad. You know, they're making a lot of money unlike the dot-com companies that weren't making any money.
And that may be true that Nvidia is making money, but you have to look at the source of those profits. Where are they coming from? The customers who are spending all this money are basically losing a fortune. So, Nvidia's gains simply come at the expense of the hyperscalers' losses. Now, up until now, they're not really reporting losses.
They still have income because uh the expenditures are capex. And because they're capex, they don't reduce EBITDA, right? The the main earnings numbers, earnings before interest, dividends, depreciation, all that stuff. What Wall Street focuses on, they don't look at depreciation. They just look at the cash numbers.
And capex is excluded. But these big companies, Meta and and um Amazon and Google and now SpaceX, a lot of these companies initially, maybe not SpaceX, but had a lot of cash. Cuz Google and Amazon, they they had a lot of cash on their balance sheets. And well, they used that cash to build out the data centers and to buy all these GPUs and other, you know, semiconductors, whatever they needed.
But once they burned through the cash, then they had to use their earnings. But now, they're resorting to debt. They have borrowed tens of billions, hundreds of billions, maybe over 100 billion already has been borrowed in the bond market. So, these big cash cows have turned into, you know, cash vacuums.
They're now sucking up cash by going to the credit markets and borrowing tremendous amounts of money, which is not only going to drive up the interest cost of what they have to borrow, but it's going to drive up the interest cost of what everybody has to pay, because there's only so much savings to go around.
And if now you have these once cash, you know, cows now sucking up cash, now you have companies that weren't borrowing any money, that were lending money, right? Meta was lending money. Google was they were buying treasuries. They were lenders. Now they're massive borrowers, because they're borrowing a fortune to pay for all this CapEx.
This is also what's pushing up interest rates, crowding out the market. You got the government borrowing more, you got these companies borrowing more, but the other problem is now these companies are losing money if you actually count what they're spending. And especially if you consider the depreciation.
Now, I know that they're probably depreciating the GPUs and stuff over five or six years. But, um that those losses are are are not really being recognized by the market, because they're, you know, they're they're they're looking beyond that. But, in reality, the life cycle of this equipment is more like two to three years.
It becomes obsolete very quickly. And so, the money that's being spent is not really like capital investment, where you spend the money and now you've got something for 20 or 30 years that you could use. This is where the conversation becomes much bigger than AI alone. When huge corporations finance massive investments with borrowed money, the ripple effects can spread across the entire financial system.
That's why investors aren't just watching technology anymore, they're watching the credit markets just as closely. You're spending money and you're going to have to spend it all over again in two or three years. That's really not like capital investment. That's more like the cost of doing business. That's like an operating expense.
That's really what all this is. These big hyperscalers are spending a fortune and losing money. They are not making money on their AI products. Yes, there's a lot of demand for these products because they don't cost very much. Even the premium uh services where they may be a hundred or two hundred dollars a month, they're still pricing that at a loss.
But, you know, you got a lot of people that are using, you know, for whatever, ten, twenty dollars a month, they're losing a ton of money on on that. And then there are other people that use AI for free. Right? When you go to Google, right? And you use their AI, you search AI and ask, you don't have to pay anything.
It's all free. But it's not free to Google. Google is spending a lot of money on the compute that makes its AI work, but it's not charging anybody anything. You know, and and they look at the demand, oh, we got all this demand for AI. Sure, cuz you're giving it away. I mean, you get plenty of demand for stuff when it doesn't cost any money.
The problem is, are these hyperscalers ever going to make any money on what they're spending? Sure, there's going to be demand for AI, but is it worth the money that's going in to all this computer equipment? And they're just going to have to keep on replacing it because it becomes obsolete. It is an arms race.
And if you don't get the latest and best, well, then you fall behind. So, you have even though you spent all this money in the past, but that doesn't do it. You got to keep spending it all over again. So, this is, I think, a disaster in the making. You know, nobody really is thinking about the end game.
Everybody is just trying to get in on the action. Nobody Everybody wants to outspend everybody else, keep up with the Joneses. And as long as the stock prices are going up, you know, the companies are getting rewarded not based on how much they earn, but based on how much they spend. Because everybody thinks the biggest spender is the biggest winner.
But they're not. Right now, the companies that win are the companies that are selling the crap that they're buying. But even those companies are going to have a lot of trouble when their customers can't buy anymore because they're broke and they can't borrow anymore. And at some point, the bond market is going to break.
There's a limit to how much money people want to lend to Meta and and Google and and and and and uh SpaceX. I mean, SpaceX just the other day, it was up today, but it went below 137. So, it was two $2 above the IPO price, down 40% from its post-IPO high. So, people are starting to get worried about Facebook stock.
Why the I mean, about a SpaceX stock? Why the hell would you want to buy their bonds? Cuz you don't even get much upside. I think it's maybe 1 2% above Treasuries. What the hell? I mean, why take all that risk? Just buy Treasuries. In fact, if you really want to uh loan money and or buy SpaceX bonds or buy, you know, Meta or, you know, Amazon bonds, wait till the market breaks.
This is a point that George Gammon made, and I agreed. Just like what happened with Stretch, right? If you really wanted to buy Stretch, you you didn't buy them at par. You waited for the market to sell off, and then you bought them at 75 cents on the dollar. You got a deal. So, if you want to to lend money to these hyperscalers, don't lend it at par.
Wait for the market to break because there's going to be a scare. And of course, all of our GDP right now is a function of this AI arms race. All these huge companies spending a fortune without any regard to whether or not they're ever going to make money on these investments. Again, I believe in AI.
I think AI could be a game-changer. I think it could be, you know, one of the biggest factors of increased productivity. Uh you know, bigger than the internet. You know, it could be like, you know, like like the wheel. I mean, it's a big invention that can really improve mankind. But, that doesn't mean these companies that are currently spending a fortune buying this equipment are actually going to get a positive return on their investment.
The real winners from AI may be companies that nobody's even thinking about. In fact, I think the biggest winners are going to be the companies that incorporate the AI and use it to make more profits because buying the AI could end up being commoditized. There may not be a lot of profits. Whether you agree with this outlook or not, the core message is really about risk management.
Markets can stay optimistic much longer than expected, but when sentiment finally changes, it often happens much faster than most investors anticipate. That's why understanding the bigger picture matters just as much as following the headlines. At the end of the day, it could be a low-margin business supplying AI.
And I know it takes a lot of energy to power it now, but maybe it won't take as much in the future when people come up with a better way to do it. So, all of this spending could be a complete waste. Uh and I think we're we're headed for a a big drop in the market. And by the way, as long as I mentioned strategy, Saylor, again for the third week in a row, didn't buy any Bitcoin, but he didn't sell any.
Instead, he sold $467 million worth of uh strategy common stock to lift their cash reserves to 3 billion. Why Why he sell stock? The stock is trading at nearly a 40% discount to Bitcoin. He destroyed shareholder value with a huge negative Bitcoin yield on this transaction. Strategy shareholders would have been much better off.
In fact, stretch shareholders would have been better off had Strategy sold Bitcoin. Instead, Saylor decided not to sell Bitcoin and to sell common stock instead. Which was a massive dilution for no reason. But there is a reason. And the reason is he doesn't want to sell Bitcoin because he doesn't want to push the price down.
Which shows you all the talk about these Bitcoin reserves and how they got 30 years worth of reserves is all BS. He's afraid to use the reserves. Saylor knows if he starts really selling Bitcoin, the price is going to crash. Now, the problem is it's going to crash anyway because the market realizes the bind that he's in.
And even if he doesn't sell, the market is going to crash out from under him. But he is so nervous about selling Bitcoin that he's willing to sell his own stock at a massive discount. In fact, part of their new plan for, you know, their cash reserve plan was authorizing the sale of a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin to buy back Strategy shares, which they should be doing right now because of the massive discount.
Well, given that they're authorized to buy back stock, why is he selling even more? You know, exacerbating the very discount that the buyback was authorized to try to reduce. It's all because he recognizes uh the the problem that the market is still glossing over. Believe me, you know, if Bitcoiners understood the severity, Bitcoin would be much lower right now.
It In fact, it's amazing to me that Bitcoin is still above 60,000. I know a lot of people regret that they didn't buy Bitcoin when they first heard about it, like me, right? I I I I wish I'd have bought it when I first heard about it. I don't regret not buying it 3 4 5 years ago. But yeah, 15 years ago, sure.
I should have bought it. But what's going to happen next is not going to be about the people who regret not buying it. It's going to be all the people who regret not selling it. People who don't sell Bitcoin at $60,000. In fact, now it's more like 64,000. I think the real resistance is about 65,000.
That's kind of was the support and now it's kind of resistance. The next level of support, you know, just a little bit below uh a 60,000 58,000 about there is like kind of support, 65 resistance. But I think once it cracks 58, it's going to crack 50 and then it could go right to 30 or 20. Uh but the people who don't sell it sell it now, they're going to be the ones uh that are going to have a lot of regrets.
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