저자: 미상 · 외국인
요약 보기
마이클 베리의 2005년 CDS 베팅과 2008년 위기를 되짚고, 그가 최근 X에 남긴 'Sometimes the only winning move is not to play' 글과 11월 25일 예고를 근거로 AI 버블과 붕괴 가능성을 경고한다. 근거로 기술기업 자본지출 증가율(약 18%, 닷컴 정점 수준), 클라우드 성장률 둔화(AWS 36%→17% 등), 순환적 AI 투자 구조, 감가상각 연장에 따른 약 1,760억 달러 이익 과소계상 주장을 제시한다. 베리의 풋옵션 포지션(엔비디아 약 1.87억 달러, 팔란티어 약 9.12억 달러)도 언급한다. 영상은 구체적 자산 방향을 명시하지 않고 '버블 붕괴'라는 시장 전반 경고에 머문다.
다듬은 글
On May 19th, 2005, Michael Bur made a series of trades that would change his life and eventually the world's economy. He bought $60 million worth of credit default swaps from Deutsche Bank, betting against the US housing market. Back then, almost no one understood what he was doing. His investors questioned him.
Wall Street mocked him. But Bur didn't care because when he looked at the numbers, he saw something no one else wanted to see. A bubble waiting to burst. Two years later, the bubble did. The housing market collapsed, global banks crumbled, and Michael Bur walked away with a hund00 million in personal profit and a reputation as the man who saw it coming.
But what most people don't realize is that Bur never saw himself as lucky. To him, predicting disaster wasn't a gift. It was a curse. He warned early. He was ignored. And when the world finally caught up, it was already too late. Fast forward to today. After 2 and 1/2 years of silence, he's spoken again.
Not in an interview or a report, but in a single post on X. A message as cryptic as it is unsettling. Sometimes we see bubbles. Sometimes there is something to do about it. Sometimes the only winning move is not to play. It's short. It's simple. And if you know Michael Bur's history, it's terrifying because every time he sounded this calm, it's never been good news.
So, what could that mean? Another bold prediction, a warning, or the beginning of a market storm most people still refuse to see coming? And this brings us to what feels like deja vu, the ghost of 2008. For years, he stayed quiet, occasionally surfacing online to post short, cryptic warnings, many of which later on turned out to be right.
Still, most people dismissed them. Because Bur's curse has always been timing. He tends to be early, sometimes by years, and that's exactly what makes his sudden return today feel so unsettling. His ex- formally Twitter account would occasionally light up with a warning, a sarcastic comment, or a chart that almost no one understood.
And then, just as suddenly, he'd delete everything. It became his signature move. Speak the truth, leave no trace. Then, in early 2023, his account went dark again. For more than two and a half years, not a single word, no tweets, no replies, no commentary, just silence until now. When he returned in late October, people noticed immediately.
Not just because he was back, but because of what his profile said. His display name read Cassandra Unchained. And that's no coincidence. In Greek mythology, Cassandra was cursed to see the future, to know exactly what was coming. but never to be believed. That's how Bur sees himself. The man who warns gets mocked and is eventually proven right.
Even his bio carried weight. Something special coming November 25th. No context, no explanation, just a date and a promise. For a man known for his precision, that kind of teaser means something's brewing. On October 31st, Michael Bur wrote, "Sometimes we see bubbles. Sometimes there is something to do about it.
Sometimes the only winning move is not to play. Within hours, screenshots spread across exreedit and finance blogs everywhere. People debated what he meant. Was this a warning about tech stocks, a message about the AI boom, or was Bur stepping back from the market entirely? The wording itself was deliberate.
Sometimes we see bubbles. He's talking about awareness, the moment when hype replaces logic. Sometimes there's something to do about it. That's action. The moment to profit from the madness. And sometimes the only winning move is not to play. That's restraint. The hardest move of all. It's patience when everyone else is chasing returns.
Now, to understand what might have pushed Bur to post that message, we need to look at what's happening in today's market and what he's been posting about since his return. Because beneath that one tweet, there's a much bigger story unfolding. A few days later, Bur started sharing charts again. Three to be exact.
Each one hinting that today's market might be standing on the same kind of shaky foundation that once fueled the dot collapse. The first chart shows that the pace of spending by US tech companies has surged back to levels last seen during the.com bubble of 1999 to 2000. The dark line tracks the 5-year growth rate of capital expenditures.
The money tech firms pour into servers, chips, and infrastructure. While the lighter line shows the broader tech, media, and telecom group. Right now, the tech sector's spending growth is running around 18%, almost identical to its pre- crash peak a quarter century ago. That means companies are once again investing far ahead of actual demand, convinced that today's innovations, AI, cloud, and data centers will justify massive expansion.
But history says when capex climbs this fast without equally strong profits behind it, it often marks the final stage of a boom. The last time this happened, the dotcom era ended in a sharp correction. And this chart suggests we may be approaching a similar moment of overconfidence. This chart compares how fast the world's biggest cloud companies, Amazon Alphabet and Microsoft, are growing now versus just a few years ago.
The black bars represent their average annual growth rates between 2018 and 2022, while the red bars show the averages for 2023 to 2025. The difference is dramatic. Amazon's cloud division AWS has slowed from about 36% growth to 17%. Alphabet's cloud growth has dropped from 45% to 29%. Even Microsoft, which has held up best, slipped slightly from 22% to 20%.
What this means is that the core engine driving tech profits is cooling down even as valuations for these companies remain near record highs. For years, the cloud business was like the printing press for tech, steady, predictable, and endlessly scalable. But these numbers show that growth is losing momentum and the easy expansion phase might be over.
In other words, while the AI boom has captured investor imagination, the real underlying businesses are no longer accelerating. It's a signal that the fundamentals aren't keeping up with the hype. And then came the most revealing image, what is known as the AI money machine. It showed how companies like Nvidia, Open AI, Oracle, and Microsoft are all feeding each other's growth, reinvesting in the same bubble of optimism.
Nvidia invests in OpenAI and supplies the chips. Open AAI places massive orders with Nvidia and leases cloud space from Oracle. Oracle builds data centers using that hardware and hosts OpenAI's models. Microsoft pours billions into the same ecosystem. It's a circular economy where inflated valuations sustain each other at least until one side breaks.
This, according to Bur is how bubbles work. They feed on excitement, on belief, on the illusion that growth is infinite until it's not. And that's why his warning not to play suddenly feels less cryptic and more like a cautionary heads up to anyone paying attention. But Bur's concerns don't stop at overvaluation.
The numbers behind the numbers, that's where his real alarm bells are ringing. In his pinned post, he accused some of the biggest names in tech of using accounting tricks to make their earnings look stronger than they really are. It's not a flashy accusation. It's something most people gloss over, but for Bur, that's exactly where the danger hides.
He wrote about companies understating depreciation by extending the useful life of assets. In plain English, that means they're stretching out how long they claim their equipment, data centers, or software will last, making expenses look smaller and profits look bigger. On paper, everything seems healthy.
In reality, it's like painting over cracks in a wall. The problem's still there, just under a fresh coat. According to his analysis, this tactic could lead to an understatement of $176 billion in depreciation from 2026 through 2028. That's not a small error. That's a potential earnings distortion of over 20% for companies like Oracle and Meta.
To him, this isn't just creative accounting. It's dja vu. Because before the 2008 crisis, Wall Street did something similar. packaging risk into products that looked safe. This time, the deception isn't in mortgages. It's in the balance sheets. Companies are buying time, inflating numbers, and giving investors a false sense of stability.
It's the same human story just told through different spreadsheets. Every time Michael Bur surfaces, it's never just about one company or one chart. It's about the pattern, the psychology, the cycle that keeps repeating because human behavior never really changes. And if there's one thing Bur has studied more than numbers, it's people.
The greed, the optimism, and the fear that move markets like tides. In his recent posts, you can sense that tone again. Not anger, but disappointment. He once called the current environment, the greatest speculative bubble of all time in all things. To him, it's not just tech. It's housing again. It's consumer credit.
It's investors piling into anything that promises fast growth. The names have changed, but the story hasn't. Look at what's happening today. Artificial intelligence is the new gold rush. Companies are raising valuations not on profits, but on possibilities. Everyone's chasing the next big thing. Just like the dot frenzy in the late 1990s.
Back then, people believed the internet would change everything. And it did. But that didn't stop the market from collapsing under its own weight. First, Bur knows this cycle by heart. He's watched investors call him a pessimist before every crash and a genius after. But what he's really pointing out isn't doom, it's discipline.
He's reminding people that optimism without accountability leads to the same place every time. Inflated valuations, crushed confidence, and a painful reset. That's why his warnings hit differently. They're not emotional. They're analytical. He isn't rooting for failure. He's warning about patterns because the same forces that built the last bubble are alive and well today.
And if history repeats, as it often does, we might be closer to the burst than most investors think. Michael Bur's line, the only winning move is not to play. Isn't about quitting. It's about discipline. He's signaling investors that when markets turn irrational, the smartest move is often to step aside.
Bur's strategy has always been patience over panic, waiting for fundamentals to matter again. In the 2000s, people said housing never goes down. Today it's AI can't fail. The words change, but the psychology doesn't. When he says the only winning move, he's borrowing the phrase from an old film War Games, where a computer realizes that in certain games, the only way to win is not to play at all.
For Bur not to play means protecting your capital when others are chasing euphoria. And this time, he's not just warning, he's acting on it. Recent regulatory filings show that his firm Scion Asset Management has placed put options worth over $1 billion against some of the most hyped AI stocks on the planet, roughly $187 million against Nvidia Corporation, and another $912 million against Palunteer Technologies.
So, when he says the only winning move, he's not just quoting a movie, he's showing it through his portfolio. While others rush to buy the story of infinite AI growth, Bur is positioning for the moment when reality catches up. Because for him and for anyone watching closely, not to play doesn't mean fear.
It means waiting for the fever to break, for prices to meet reality, and for opportunity to return once the noise fades. If there's one thing Michael Bur doesn't do, it's leave details to chance. So, when his bio suddenly read, "Something special coming November 25th," people took notice. He's not promoting a product.
He's not teasing a book. This is Bur. Every word carries intention. So, what could it mean? Maybe he's preparing to release new research, a deep dive into accounting manipulation, or an updated macro thesis. Or it could mark the timing of a major move in his personal portfolio, maybe a new big short.
And then there's the possibility that it's just a psychological nudge, a date meant to make investors think, to stop, to question, to reassess the euphoria around them. Whatever happens on November 25th, one thing is clear. His reappearance isn't random. It's coordinated. The tweet, the data drops, the cryptic tone, they're all part of a sequence, a buildup.
And if history is any guide, when Bur starts dropping breadcrumbs, it's usually because he already knows where the trail ends. He's not shouting crash. He's signaling watch closely. And this time, maybe the world finally will. Want to know Bur's four patterns that always show up before every major crash in the last 500 years, and how they're appearing again right now? Click the video on screen to see for
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