Quick Read – Paulson warns NVDA-fueled AI capex mirrors 2008’s circular risk: chip vendors fund AI labs that buy their chips, concentrating risk inside the loop. – AI will quickly hollow out white-collar roles in legal, coding, and analysis even as headline unemployment at 4.2%…
sks the damage. – The man who ran Treasury during the last real financial crisis went on CNBC Tuesday from the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, sitting alongside Tim Geithner, and refused to pick a side. Hank Paulson steered a middle course between Bezos-style AI utopianism and Amodei-style civilizational alarm
He looked at the AI capex boom and saw a pattern from 2008, echoing its shape rather than its crash. That shape is money moving in a circle. For a retail investor watching NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)-fueled index gains alongside a job market where JOLTS openings just fell to 7.36 million from 7.585 million in April, the Paulson framing matters.
The Circular Money Loop Paulson Is Watching Here is the setup in his own words. “The suppliers of chips and compute, you know, making investments in the customers. So they’ve got the capacity to buy and customers that need the chips, making investments in some of the suppliers to make sure they’ve got them.” He was careful to say nothing nefarious is happening. Everyone acts rationally inside their own contract.