AI is driving markets and GDP growth—but the underlying financing resembles the 19th-century railroad industry, which had its own share of crashes.
Financial history can help us here. If you’re unsure if there’s an AI bubble, refer to the historian Charles Kindleberger’s five-stage model:
Displacement: Some change in economic circumstances creates new and profitable opportunities for certain companies.
Euphoria or overtrading: A feedback process sets in whereby rising expected profits lead to rapid growth in share prices.
Mania or bubble: The prospect of easy capital gains attracts first-time investors and swindlers eager to defraud them.
Distress: The insiders discern that expected profits cannot possibly justify the now-exorbitant price of the shares and begin to take profits by selling.
Revulsion or discredit: As share prices fall, the outsiders stampede for the exits, causing the bubble to burst altogether.
We are currently at stage 3.
Niall Ferguson The Free Press 17 November 2025
https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-the-ai-boom-is-a-house-of-cards
Another Free Press columnist, economist Tyler Cowen, isn’t so gloomy. He writes that it is “premature to write off current AI valuations as a ‘bubble.’ ”
Tyler reaches for a more recent historical analogy—the dot-com bubble—and draws encouragement from Amazon. Its stock crashed along with the likes of Pets.com and Webvan, then soared to heights beyond anyone’s expectations.
“The lesson is clear: If you see an investment that looks steady, sometimes the best thing to do is to jump on it,” Tyler writes.
“No one can know when the market bottom is going to come, and either way, it’ll probably spike again fairly soon.”
He goes further: Perhaps all this talk of a bubble is really a security blanket, because the alternative—that the AI hype is real—is even more unsettling.
Tyler Cowen The Free Press 18 November 2025
Av människans alla stora innovationer under de senaste 200 åren har tre av fyra genererat någon form av bubbla.
Nvidias börsuppgång är visserligen astronomisk, men den understöds ju av verklig försäljning och dessutom hög lönsamhet. Den nya AI-ekonomin understöds till stor del av några av historiens mest framgångsrika och lönsamma företag. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon.
Några av de bolagen fortsätter nu att plöja ner helt vansinniga summor i nya AI-datacenter med Nvidias mikrochip. Knäckfrågan gäller om dagens generativa AI kommer att leva upp till sitt löfte. Är de produkter som byggs av bolag längre ner i pyramiden, som OpenAI och Anthropic, kommersiellt bärkraftiga?
Carl Johan von Seth DN 20 november 2025
Open AI, Nvidia och Meta – så hänger AI-bolagen ihop
Bubbelrisken finns hos Nvidias kunder
Ai, Britain’s 1846 Railway Mania and Tulips
Godmorgon 18 november 2025
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