저자: KenGriffin · 외국인
요약 보기
AI가 화이트칼라 업무를 빠르게 대체하며 재교육이 시급하지만 스타트업 등 기회도 동시에 열린다. AI 투자에 버블 징후가 있고 GPU 과잉공급 위험이 1999~2000년 통신 광섬유 과잉투자와 유사하다. 헤지펀드 디레버리징은 시장 설명으로 과도하게 남용된다. 중간선거에서 여당이 의회 일부를 잃을 가능성이 크며, 재정적자 40조 달러 해법은 긴축이 아니라 성장(AI·에너지·교육·이민)이라고 주장한다.
다듬은 글
One Friday evening, watching a machine finish six weeks of PhD level work in a single afternoon left me feeling genuinely depressed. Not excited, depressed. And that single moment connects directly to a $40 trillion deficit, a midterm election that could flip both chambers of Congress, and a warning I have about exactly what's happening on the streets of Paris right now.
Stick with me for the next 25 minutes because these aren't separate stories. They're all part of the same picture and most people are only seeing one piece of it at a time. Let me take you back to a moment I've talked about before because it still sits with me. Work that used to take our PhDs and master's degree holders four to six weeks to complete.
The kind of highlevel white collar research that represents years of specialized training got done with a few keystrokes and a weight of a few hours. Same answer, same quality. And when I went home that Friday, it was genuinely a depressing moment because you're watching the threat to white collar jobs stop being theoretical and start playing out in real time.
As a business owner, you're watching your own competitive advantages get filled in by bulldozers. But here's what makes this complicated. At the exact same time, I found myself thinking this could be a golden era for entrepreneurs, for new business formation, for young founders in this country. So you end up holding three completely different emotions at once watching the same development unfold.
And all three of them have real consequences for this economy. Here's the first lesson. Don't let anyone tell you this is a simple story. If someone describes AI's impact in one emotion, excitement, or fear, they're only telling you a third of the truth. And that tension between threat and opportunity isn't abstract.
It's already reshaping who wins and who gets left behind. Starting with something most people haven't thought carefully about. Here's the part of this conversation that doesn't get nearly enough honest attention. Certain careers are already gone. If your expertise is translation, say English to German, there's a real chance that work has already disappeared and it's genuinely difficult to find a comparable substitute for that specific skill.
That's not a hypothetical warning. That's happening right now. And as a country, we need to embrace reskilling in a profound way. There's plenty of talk about it in Washington. There's almost no action for corporate America. The flip side is this. When your competitive moes get filled in, you have to move faster.
You have to innovate faster, create more value for customers faster, and figure out how to cut costs faster. And here's the silver lining in that. It's actually good for the American consumer. That pressure forces companies to genuinely step up their game and the public wins on the back of that competition.
Here's the second lesson. The people who survive this transition won't be the ones who ignore it. They'll be the ones who treat reskilling as urgent, not as a talking point. Now, here's where the story turns genuinely hopeful because there's a side to this disruption that almost nobody talks about enough when people start small businesses.
It does wonders for employment and in particular, it gives people with less than perfect resumes a real shot at building something meaningful. Startups do something genuinely important in this country. They'll hire somebody who wants to work hard even without the perfect pedigree. For that individual, joining a startup gives them a whole new lane to build a career in.
We don't talk about that enough in America, how important startups are for jumpstarting careers, especially for people with imperfect backgrounds. And these startups are going to unleash an enormous number of new products that none of us have even thought of yet. Is this optimism replacing the depression I described earlier?
Honestly, yes. Because history shows us that our free market goes through transitions like this one. These transitions are hard on the people caught in them. There's no sugar coating that. But ultimately, our lives end up better. There's no comparison between living here now and living a century ago.
This moment right now is going to be part of how future generations describe a major turning point in history. Here's the third lesson. Disruption and opportunity aren't opposites. They're the same event experienced differently depending on whether you adapt early or late. Now, all of this AI transformation runs on something increasingly expensive and contested.
And that's where the market itself has started showing real signs of nerves. Let's address this directly because the question keeps coming up. Is this all a bubble? The big picture is this. There are almost certainly bubbles within this moment. Any radical transformation of the economy tends to come intertwined with one.
I remember the metrics we used to value internet companies back in 1999 and 2000. And let's be honest, some of those business models were pretty fanciful. But I also wish I'd held on to my Amazon stock from that era. Here's what's easy to forget. The internet, which was genuinely the great bubble of its time, ended up becoming more woven into daily life than almost anyone predicted.
My own son, at 13 years old, looked at me like I was a fossil when he found out I'd lived before the internet existed. That's how total the transformation became. These bubbles, if we want to use that word, tend to coincide with giant technological transformations the same way railroads did in their era.
And what's left in the aftermath is often genuinely game-changing with the companies that survive becoming market leaders for decades. But here's the real risk hiding underneath the excitement. GPUs behave a lot like airline seats. Low marginal cost to run, which means the moment you have over capacity, pricing can go into freef fall.
We saw this exact pattern with the telecom fiber buildout back in 2000. We built far more fiber than there was demand for and the price of telecommunications collapsed. If GPU provisioning ever exceeds actual demand, marginal pricing could do the same thing and that would upend a lot of the investment assumptions people are currently working with.
Here's the fourth lesson. Every transformative technology gets followed by excess. The real question isn't whether that happens. It's whether you're positioned to survive the correction when it does. Now, speaking of surviving corrections, let's talk about something I think gets blamed far too quickly.
Whenever markets get volatile, here's a pattern I've watched play out over and over again. Whenever markets sell off, the first explanation everyone reaches for is hedge fund deleveraging. Here's the problem with that. Over the past 10 years, I've watched the entire industry get declared leveraged to zero at least 10,000 times.
It's become the go-to excuse because it conveniently washes your hands of any real accountability. My own rule is simple. Hedge fund deleveraging should be answer number 10 on the list of possible explanations. Never answer number one. The moment you reach for that excuse, you actually stop learning what's really happening.
Instead, the right questions are what prices are actually changing and why? What don't we understand yet? What have other sophisticated players figured out that we haven't connected yet? Go figure that out first. Only after exhausting every other possibility does the leveraging even belong in the conversation.
Here's the fifth lesson. The explanation that requires the least work to accept is usually the one that teaches you the least. Discipline means asking the harder question first. Now, let's shift from markets to something that affects every single American far more directly. The midterm elections happening in just two weeks and the fiscal mess sitting underneath them.
Let's be direct about where things stand. The midterms function as a check and balance on whoever holds power. And right now, the sitting party is very likely to lose control of one or both chambers of Congress. That's simply part of the normal political cycle. I support candidates across these cycles, many of them for years, people I believe represent values important to this country's future.
And to be clear, that support has never been limited to one party. I was one of the strongest supporters of Rahm Emanuel's mayoral run in Chicago. And I did an early fundraiser for a young senator from Illinois named Barack Obama because I believed he represented something important for the country's future.
Within my own firm, a slight majority of my colleagues are probably Democrats, and that's completely fine. What I care about is good, healthy debate about who the right people are to run this country, not rigid party loyalty. Now, to be fair to this administration, there are real wins here. Closing the border, something we were told for years couldn't be done, happened almost overnight, and I think most Americans genuinely see that as a win.
But there are also real failures I won't paper over. The handling of illegal immigration in terms of how we treat people who came here during a period when our borders were effectively open and have been working hard and contributing ever since has been handled poorly. There needs to be a path maybe not to citizenship but to being a contributing stable member of society because growing this economy is the only way we honor the promises we've made on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
And the tariff battles with Canada, Europe, and our allies have been a disaster. I said this when it started and I'll say it plainly now. It's been inflationary and it has severed supply chains around the world without efficiently re-industrializing America. Most people chasing the dream of an industrialized America don't actually want to work in a factory making sneakers.
What we should be embracing instead is robotics, which is exactly why I committed $3 billion to Carnegie Melon's robotics program. That's how you re-industrialize with real independence, not by chasing jobs nobody actually wants back. Here's the sixth lesson. Real political support isn't about cheering every decision from your own side.
It's about being honest enough to name the wins and the failures, even when that's uncomfortable. Now, there's a warning I want to give directly about a political direction some candidates are pushing toward, and I want to be completely honest about why it concerns me. Here's something I think every young American needs to actually look at closely.
What's happening in France right now? France represents the dream that's often described on the political left here. a rich generous social safety net, extensive government support, broad economic security, and right now the country spends roughly 60% of its GDP at the government level. Yet, the streets are in real turmoil.
It's genuinely heartbreaking to watch. I lived in Chicago and I watched similar scenes play out there, too. So, I don't think this is some isolated, uniquely French phenomenon. My concern with the rise of candidates aligned with democratic socialism isn't really about any one election. It's about where that philosophy actually leads when you follow it to its logical end.
A society built around how much can be taken from others tends to start with property and tends not to stop there because rights tend to follow property down the same path. That's not the kind of society I want built here. and to be specific since I think specificity matters more than vague warnings.
I've been direct about my concerns with certain candidates and certain policies, including describing a push for a progressive tax system in Illinois, championed by Governor Pritsker as a proposal built without first addressing the actual spending addiction in that state. I personally offered to publicly support raising taxes if he would put a constitutional amendment on the ballot to reform the state's unsustainable pension promises first.
He declined and the tax amendment he pursued instead on its own failed at the ballot box. Rather than taking that result as a signal to get spending under control, the response was to lash out instead of reflecting on what voters had actually said. Here's the seventh lesson. The warning in Paris isn't that government support itself is bad.
It's that you cannot spend your way into permanent prosperity without eventually confronting the bill. And pretending otherwise just delays a much harder reckoning. So if spending is the disease, what's actually the cure? This is where I think almost everyone in Washington is missing the real answer.
Here's my honest answer to the deficit question, and it's simpler than most politicians want to admit. The only real path out of this is growth. Not just spending cuts alone, not just tax increases alone. Growth. That means pushing hard on the technologies that will drive productivity for the next 20 years.
The compute buildout, nuclear fish, and fusion, batteries, robotics. That should be the singular economic focus coming out of Washington. It also means pushing our allies in Europe to grow their own economies instead of treating trade with them as a battle to win. because tariff wars with Europe have been counterproductive when we actually need them to be stronger economic partners, not weaker ones.
Second, we have to fix education. Full stop. We cannot have a country with genuinely broken schools and still expect the prosperity we've enjoyed for the last 50 years to continue. I've talked before about a shocking statistic out of Illinois. Dozens of schools where not a single student could perform at grade level.
Not one. Let that sink in. Compare that to what's actually possible when a school system gets it right and you start to see just how large the gap really is between failure and excellence in American education. Third, we need the political courage to create something like a modern version of the bipartisan debt commissions of the past.
a genuine up or down vote on entitlement reform because we absolutely have to honor the promises made to retirees while also having an honest conversation about working a bit longer before drawing benefits. And fourth, immigration stated plainly, every brilliant person in the world who studies at our universities, I want them to stay here, build here, contribute here.
Our elite schools are often 15 to 20% international students. Give them the degree and the green card together and let them build their future in this country instead of taking what they learned somewhere else. Here's the eighth and final lesson. A $40 trillion deficit doesn't get solved through austerity alone.
And it doesn't get solved through spending alone either. It gets solved through growth. And growth requires education, immigration, and productivity working together, not fighting each other. Friday evening that left me genuinely depressed about AI's impact on work. And it ends with a warning from the streets of Paris about what happens when a society spends without ever confronting the bill.
In between, we talked about a golden age of entrepreneurship hiding inside real disruption, a bubble that may or may not be close to bursting, a lazy excuse the financial industry reaches for far too often, and a midterm election that will test whether Washington is actually listening to what voters are telling them.
The through line across all of it is simple. Growth solves more problems than any single policy fight ever will. Whether that's AI displacing careers, a government drowning in debt, or a society deciding what kind of future it actually wants to build. If this gave you a clearer, more honest picture of where things really stand, ich of these issues, AI's impact on jobs, the deficit, or the midterms, do you think matters most for the next five
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