6 articles

Finance

Capital, currencies and the plumbing of global markets.

The Limits of Intelligence: What the AI Prize Is Worth, and Who Gets It

The first three papers in this series established that roughly $730 billion a year is being spent on a war logic, not a return logic. This one asks the question that decides whether the war bonds pay: how big is the prize, and how many hands does it land in? The answer is a matrix, not a number — and the private marks have already priced the best cell in it.

3 Nov 20268 min read

Finance

AI's Shovel Makers Are Priced for 7% Compute Growth Forever

Grant the bulls everything — the buildout completes, the demand is real. Margins still normalize, and the arithmetic says shovel valuations embed ~7% growth of the compute base in perpetuity, nearly double the semiconductor industry's own long-run rate. That is as much a bet on energy as it is on AI.

31 Oct 202610 min read

Finance

Why the Retail Investor Cannot Solve the Prisoners' Dilemma

The AI buildout is individually rational for every company involved and potentially destructive in aggregate. An index fund owns all of them. That is not diversification. It is a bet that the prisoners collectively produce a tolerable outcome.

4 Oct 20269 min read

Finance

What AI Investment Would Look Like in Peacetime

The war-bond frame explains why hyperscalers will spend roughly $800 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026. Strip away the war, and the capital-budgeting math supports a fraction of that. The gap between the two numbers is the war premium — and it can be measured.

4 Oct 20267 min read

Finance

AI Is a $730B Prisoners' Dilemma. Your Index Fund Owns Every Prisoner.

The four largest US hyperscalers will spend roughly $730 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 — nearly double what they spent in 2025, and roughly all of their operating cash flow. Call it a bubble and you miss the mechanism: every one of them is acting rationally. That is the problem.

4 Oct 20268 min read

Finance

AI Investments Are the War Bonds of the New Cold War

The AI buildout is not a bubble. It is a war bond market. $730 billion this year. Four CEOs who say they would rather go bankrupt than lose. War bonds pay off only in victory.

4 Oct 20267 min read

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