Monday morning the market fell.
Nvidia down three percent before the bell. Nasdaq futures pointing down more than a percent and a half. Overseas it was worse. SoftBank closed down almost eleven percent. Korea’s market dropped three.
Why? Because over the weekend some men gave speeches.
The head of Anthropic said the industry was moving too fast. The head of OpenAI agreed. So did the men running Google DeepMind and xAI. A researcher who quit last week said the labs were gambling with our lives.
Nobody passed a law. Nobody won a case. No machine was held to anything.
Four men talked, and a trillion dollars moved.
Most people read a story like that and turn the page. They figure it is a rich man’s problem. Stocks go up, stocks go down, and none of it reaches a person who does not own any.
I want to tell you why that is wrong.
You are already in this. You did not buy in. Nobody asked you. But you are in it four different ways, and I can show you each one.
One. Your retirement is in it.
Not the retirement of some fellow on television. Yours.
Look at what happened to the stock market itself. In 2015, the ten biggest companies made up about nineteen percent of the S&P 500. By last year that was nearly forty-one percent.
Ten companies. Forty-one percent of the whole thing.
And those ten companies earn about thirty-two percent of the profits. So the price ran ahead of the earnings.
If you have a 401(k), you probably own an index fund. If somebody enrolled you automatically and you never touched it, you own the same thing. A target-date fund is just a bundle of index funds wearing a calmer name.
The ten biggest actively managed funds used in 401(k) plans hold, on average, thirty-eight percent of their money in tech and communications.
Public pensions are the same story. A group that studies retirement systems looked at the twenty-five biggest public pension funds. Almost nine percent of their assets sat in one basket of fifty-one AI-related companies. They estimate ten percent or more of all public plan money has that exposure.
Those are teacher funds. Firefighter funds. State employee funds.
A woman who taught third grade for thirty years and never bought a share in her life has her pension riding on whether Nvidia keeps selling chips.
She was never asked. The math decided for her.
Two. Your job may be sitting on it.
This is not a small industry off to the side. It is holding up a real piece of the economy right now.
Investment in AI data centers, hardware and networking came to about one and four tenths percent of everything this country produces in the first quarter of this year. That is double what computing infrastructure ran for years.
It is now the leading driver of growth in private investment in America.
One economist put the pace against the housing boom. Data center building is growing its share of the economy about twice as fast as housing did at its fastest.
You remember how that one ended.
So when the money slows, it does not slow in a trading account. It slows at a job site. Concrete, steel, electricians, truck drivers, the diner across the road from the pour.
Three. Your power bill already paid for it.
This one is the meanest, because it does not reverse.
Residential electricity rates are up seven point three percent over the past year. Utilities asked regulators for eighteen point six billion dollars in rate increases in just the first six months of this year. All of last year, a record year, was twenty-nine billion.
Half a year, and they are already past half of a record.
The plants and lines are going in now. If the money stopped tomorrow, they do not come back out of the ground. Somebody pays for them for thirty years.
People have figured this out. A Gallup poll found seventy-one percent of Americans oppose a data center being built near them.
And the states are moving. Illinois paused its incentives. Arizona put on a three-year moratorium. Ohio paused. Oklahoma passed a law making the big users pay their own grid costs instead of pushing them onto you. A California city voted to ban them outright.
Virginia gave up about one and a half billion dollars a year in taxes to get theirs.
The gains were always going to be somebody else’s. The bill was always going to be local.
Four.
Go back to Monday morning.
The only thing in this entire story that reacted to anything was money. And what it reacted to was four men talking on a weekend.
Not a regulator. Not a judge. Not a single rule that a single machine had to hold.
Some people will read that as good news. See, they will say, the market polices itself.
It does not.
A stock drop has no memory. It reverses on the next good quarter. It does not stop one thing a machine does at three in the morning while everybody is asleep.
What it might do, by accident, is slow the building more than anything Congress has managed.
what that means.
The only working brake on this whole thing is owned by the people who own the shares.
You carry it in your pension. You carry it in your job. You carry it in your electric bill.
And you do not hold the lever.
Nobody asked you to place this bet.
They are just going to send you the bill.
” Attic Thoughts”-library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
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