“Wall Street has, especially in recent years, managed to divorce itself almost completely from the realities of the US economy.”
This is the stuff that mystifies me about Wall Street. Why? How? The realities of the US economy should be the absolute bedrock data on which they build their stock evaluations. I realize that the Street has moved far away from simple metrics like P/E ratios, and I’ve watched during my lifetime as it’s become increasingly a casino - but have Wall Streeters truly become this disconnected? What a frightening indicator of future economic disaster!
Thank you, as always, for being grounded in reality and speaking the truth, Peter. It’s priceless!
I also have seen corporations be doomed by their delusions that their “new” way of running a company made their company - especially the management - enlightened and superior to others. Remember the “Total Quality Management “ fad of the late-eighties and early nineties? So much time and corporate money was plowed into “training” on TQM that even the lowliest employees could see that it was unproductive. (It was sort of the DEI of its time - a conceptual fad.)I was working as an environmental engineer at a consulting firm that bought into the TQM fad completely. What followed was the loss of major clients, then five waves of downsizing. I went in the third, along with my entire staff and department.
Interestingly, I was laid off on the same day and at the same hour as the head of the TQM team, so he and I went out for drinks to deal with the shock. He had a bit too much to drink, and in his bitterness, he confided a whole lot of mismanagement shenanigans that were undoubtedly unethical for him to divulge - but he was in no mood to care. Essentially, he followed the TQM dogma perfectly, but it was a load of nonsense, ticked off the top executives, and backfired in his face.
Anyways, yes, endless corporate nonsense through the ages, and you are one of the few to see things as they really are - yet another reason I hold you in high regard, Peter.
And by the way, I lost a huge chunk of my retirement savings in the dot-com crash. The bank manager of a large office of a major bank insisted that I would be a fool if I didn’t invest it all in a tech fund that had been getting close to a 15% annual return. I figured he knew a whole lot more about finance than I did, so I went with his recommendation. My only consolation is that the smug fool probably lost a whole lot more money than I did.
Ah yes, the lunacy of TQM. That was coming into vogue right about the time I graduated from college with a degree in accounting. TQM and quality control metrics were all the rage--I probably spent more time going over ISO-9000 certification data than I did going over WIP reports!
What no one ever fully processed was that all of those protocols only institutionalized failure. TQM meant that if you made a mistake on one widget, you would make the same mistake on every widget until someone (usually a customer) caught it.
It was Taylorite corporate authoritarianism masquerading as "productivity gains".
And its ideas like those which squeeze innovation out of most established businesses. When everyone has to do everything the same way, there's never a different approach for comparison to figure out what might be done better.
Once everyone thinks the same way and acts the same way, they all make the same mistakes, and usually at the same time. It never ends well.
Sounds smart - two years tops. Maybe dependent upon the rate of decline of China, etc.
I’m still left wondering, how could DeepSeek be developed with NO leaks within the tech community? Who invented it? Why is Xi (presumably) unleashing it now?
I know you don’t have the intel on it yet, but I’ll bet it’s going to be interesting stuff!
…AI as a popping bubble so soon. I would have guessed it would run for a few years first, but you’re right, things are moving too fast. AND there is a confluence of big changes happening all at the same time, worldwide. I also can see a reactionary shift accelerating. “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride…”
The question is what is it going to do for an encore? And if there is no encore then DeepSeek is just a flash in the pan.
But if there is no encore then the question eventually gets asked what any of the AI engines and language learning models are doing. If DeepSeek fails to deliver after basically showing ChatGPT and Gemini have failed to deliver, people are going to start questioning the hype.
Once that skepticism takes hold the AI bubble pops soon after.
You realize that you make women swoon with your intelligent insights, right? (“Ohhh, Magnificent Man!”)
Okay, I’ve revived with smelling salts now. Back to topic - our country has reached another ‘paradigm shift’, to use a heavily overused buzzword of the 80s. It’s the end of DEI - yay! That has fallen on its face just as all the previous management fads have, and something new will replace it. I suppose it will be “everything AI, regardless of inappropriate application” - but do you have any other thoughts on what’s next?
I suspect the next major paradigm shift will be the collapse of the AI bubble.
AI is a fascinating technology but it is just a technology. Contrary to the hyperbole in the media no, AI does not "think"--certainly not the way that humans do. Computational prowess is not thinking.
Pretending that AI does "think" is becoming another departure from reality, and eventually reality is going to brutally dispense with that notion the way it dispenses with all flights of fancy.
What happens then? That's hard to say. It could be we are seeing enough progressive trends reaching their zenith at about the same time to catalyze a major reactionary shift in society. Already globalism is becoming a discredited force (which is bad news for the global south), and DEI/ESG foolishness is quickly being exposed for the insane grift that it is. Jonathan Haidt, once one of the great advocates of social media, is sounding the alarm that too much social media is bad for one's mental health. The AI bubble bursting now would be a perfect storm of reality.
At the same time, several of the worlds power locii are collapsing: the EU is deindustrializing, Russia and China do not have the population to sustain themselves for even another ten years--and no clear successor to Putin and Xi.
What happens when reality hits everywhere all at once?
We may be closer to finding out than anyone wants to be.
The "why" is a mystery. I do not have that answer.
The "how" goes back to the heady "dot-com" era of the late 90s. The country sold itself on a bill of goods that the Internet heralded a "new economy." The president of the integration/internet service provider company I worked for at the time actually told everyone in a company meeting that businesses were not evaluated by profit and loss metrics, but by how many users they had, subscriber counts, and a whole bunch of other nonsense. A couple of co-workers asked my take on that and I told them the company was headed for bankrupcty if the folks in the C-suite really believed that.
About six months later things fell apart and the company spiraled into bankruptcy.
People have a marvelous capacity for self-delusion and the meritocratic "elites" of Wall Street persuaded themselves that what they were doing really was different.
And it isn't. A business today is functionally no different than one in the 1950s, or the 1890s. When you strip away the fancy tech screens, gadgets, doohickeys, and doomaflatcheys, most companies are run in about the same fashion as one in the 1950s or in the 1890s. There's a lot less "modern" in the "modern world" than most people want to admit.
But people prize difference in their possessions as much as they prize conformity in their peers. We want things to be different. Hell, I want to believe All Facts Matter is different from every other Substack!
As it goes in Ecclesiastes 1:2 -- "All is Vanity".
And nowhere is that more true than on Wall Street!
“Wall Street has, especially in recent years, managed to divorce itself almost completely from the realities of the US economy.”
This is the stuff that mystifies me about Wall Street. Why? How? The realities of the US economy should be the absolute bedrock data on which they build their stock evaluations. I realize that the Street has moved far away from simple metrics like P/E ratios, and I’ve watched during my lifetime as it’s become increasingly a casino - but have Wall Streeters truly become this disconnected? What a frightening indicator of future economic disaster!
Thank you, as always, for being grounded in reality and speaking the truth, Peter. It’s priceless!
Wise words, Peter.
I also have seen corporations be doomed by their delusions that their “new” way of running a company made their company - especially the management - enlightened and superior to others. Remember the “Total Quality Management “ fad of the late-eighties and early nineties? So much time and corporate money was plowed into “training” on TQM that even the lowliest employees could see that it was unproductive. (It was sort of the DEI of its time - a conceptual fad.)I was working as an environmental engineer at a consulting firm that bought into the TQM fad completely. What followed was the loss of major clients, then five waves of downsizing. I went in the third, along with my entire staff and department.
Interestingly, I was laid off on the same day and at the same hour as the head of the TQM team, so he and I went out for drinks to deal with the shock. He had a bit too much to drink, and in his bitterness, he confided a whole lot of mismanagement shenanigans that were undoubtedly unethical for him to divulge - but he was in no mood to care. Essentially, he followed the TQM dogma perfectly, but it was a load of nonsense, ticked off the top executives, and backfired in his face.
Anyways, yes, endless corporate nonsense through the ages, and you are one of the few to see things as they really are - yet another reason I hold you in high regard, Peter.
And by the way, I lost a huge chunk of my retirement savings in the dot-com crash. The bank manager of a large office of a major bank insisted that I would be a fool if I didn’t invest it all in a tech fund that had been getting close to a 15% annual return. I figured he knew a whole lot more about finance than I did, so I went with his recommendation. My only consolation is that the smug fool probably lost a whole lot more money than I did.
Ah yes, the lunacy of TQM. That was coming into vogue right about the time I graduated from college with a degree in accounting. TQM and quality control metrics were all the rage--I probably spent more time going over ISO-9000 certification data than I did going over WIP reports!
What no one ever fully processed was that all of those protocols only institutionalized failure. TQM meant that if you made a mistake on one widget, you would make the same mistake on every widget until someone (usually a customer) caught it.
It was Taylorite corporate authoritarianism masquerading as "productivity gains".
And its ideas like those which squeeze innovation out of most established businesses. When everyone has to do everything the same way, there's never a different approach for comparison to figure out what might be done better.
Once everyone thinks the same way and acts the same way, they all make the same mistakes, and usually at the same time. It never ends well.
Sounds smart - two years tops. Maybe dependent upon the rate of decline of China, etc.
I’m still left wondering, how could DeepSeek be developed with NO leaks within the tech community? Who invented it? Why is Xi (presumably) unleashing it now?
I know you don’t have the intel on it yet, but I’ll bet it’s going to be interesting stuff!
…AI as a popping bubble so soon. I would have guessed it would run for a few years first, but you’re right, things are moving too fast. AND there is a confluence of big changes happening all at the same time, worldwide. I also can see a reactionary shift accelerating. “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride…”
DeepSeek is an accelerant, as I see it.
It’s made a big splash, roiling NVidia’s stock.
The question is what is it going to do for an encore? And if there is no encore then DeepSeek is just a flash in the pan.
But if there is no encore then the question eventually gets asked what any of the AI engines and language learning models are doing. If DeepSeek fails to deliver after basically showing ChatGPT and Gemini have failed to deliver, people are going to start questioning the hype.
Once that skepticism takes hold the AI bubble pops soon after.
I give it between 18 months and two years.
Chilling, exciting, and powerful predictions! You see AI
You realize that you make women swoon with your intelligent insights, right? (“Ohhh, Magnificent Man!”)
Okay, I’ve revived with smelling salts now. Back to topic - our country has reached another ‘paradigm shift’, to use a heavily overused buzzword of the 80s. It’s the end of DEI - yay! That has fallen on its face just as all the previous management fads have, and something new will replace it. I suppose it will be “everything AI, regardless of inappropriate application” - but do you have any other thoughts on what’s next?
That's hard to say.
I suspect the next major paradigm shift will be the collapse of the AI bubble.
AI is a fascinating technology but it is just a technology. Contrary to the hyperbole in the media no, AI does not "think"--certainly not the way that humans do. Computational prowess is not thinking.
Pretending that AI does "think" is becoming another departure from reality, and eventually reality is going to brutally dispense with that notion the way it dispenses with all flights of fancy.
What happens then? That's hard to say. It could be we are seeing enough progressive trends reaching their zenith at about the same time to catalyze a major reactionary shift in society. Already globalism is becoming a discredited force (which is bad news for the global south), and DEI/ESG foolishness is quickly being exposed for the insane grift that it is. Jonathan Haidt, once one of the great advocates of social media, is sounding the alarm that too much social media is bad for one's mental health. The AI bubble bursting now would be a perfect storm of reality.
At the same time, several of the worlds power locii are collapsing: the EU is deindustrializing, Russia and China do not have the population to sustain themselves for even another ten years--and no clear successor to Putin and Xi.
What happens when reality hits everywhere all at once?
We may be closer to finding out than anyone wants to be.
The "why" is a mystery. I do not have that answer.
The "how" goes back to the heady "dot-com" era of the late 90s. The country sold itself on a bill of goods that the Internet heralded a "new economy." The president of the integration/internet service provider company I worked for at the time actually told everyone in a company meeting that businesses were not evaluated by profit and loss metrics, but by how many users they had, subscriber counts, and a whole bunch of other nonsense. A couple of co-workers asked my take on that and I told them the company was headed for bankrupcty if the folks in the C-suite really believed that.
About six months later things fell apart and the company spiraled into bankruptcy.
People have a marvelous capacity for self-delusion and the meritocratic "elites" of Wall Street persuaded themselves that what they were doing really was different.
And it isn't. A business today is functionally no different than one in the 1950s, or the 1890s. When you strip away the fancy tech screens, gadgets, doohickeys, and doomaflatcheys, most companies are run in about the same fashion as one in the 1950s or in the 1890s. There's a lot less "modern" in the "modern world" than most people want to admit.
But people prize difference in their possessions as much as they prize conformity in their peers. We want things to be different. Hell, I want to believe All Facts Matter is different from every other Substack!
As it goes in Ecclesiastes 1:2 -- "All is Vanity".
And nowhere is that more true than on Wall Street!