Here’s How the AI Crash Happens

Posted by CheetoMussolini

3 Comments

  1. CheetoMussolini on

    Securitized sketchy debt bubble 2, electric boogaloo

    >Here is where the bubble dynamics get complicated. Tech firms don’t want to formally take on debt—that is, directly ask investors for loans—because debt looks bad on their balance sheets and could reduce shareholder returns. To get around this, some are partnering with private-equity titans to do some sophisticated financial engineering, Paul Kedrosky, an investor and a financial consultant, told us. These private-equity firms put up or raise the money to build a data center, which a tech company will repay through rent. Data-center leases from, say, Meta can then be repackaged into a financial instrument that people can buy and sell—a bond, in essence. Meta recently did just this: Blue Owl Capital raised money for a massive Meta data center in Louisiana by, in essence, issuing bonds backed by Meta’s rent. And multiple data-center leases can be combined into a security and sorted into what are called “tranches” based on their risk of default. Data centers represent an $800 billion market for private-equity firms through 2028 alone. (Meta has said of its arrangement with Blue Owl that the “innovative partnership was designed to support the speed and flexibility required for Meta’s data center projects.”)

  2. It’s kinda wild that Enron happened, and then sarbanes-oxley said “we need more transparency in financial reporting for public companies”, and then people decided to just take a lot of their sketchy loan practices into private equity.

    Imagine 08′, but nobody can see the junk loans until the music stops and everything breaks.

    The K shaped economy we are currently in can only be held up as long as Deus Ex Machina is still believable.

    Deus does not look very Ex Machina right now.

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