Justin Breitfelder

Seasonal essayist. Institutional communications strategist. Next gen media, arts & culture defender —@ChicagoCouncil, @LyricOperaYP, @ChiTrust. Views my own.

[Chicago Council on Global Affairs @ChicagoCouncil]

We're live from the #250GlobalForum! Tune in to our livestream below throughout the day as senior policymakers, world-class scholars, business leaders, and influential voices from around the globe examine America's past, present, and future.

Watch live: https://t.co/vLQh4RbpEM

Follow along and join the conversation using #250GlobalForum.

#US250 #AmericaAt250

[Justin Breitfelder @jbreitfelder]

* Well maybe live-ISH, I’m a little out of practice note taking & tweeting at the same time : )

[Justin Breitfelder @jbreitfelder]

Live tweeting notes from @ChicagoCouncil America #250GlobalForum — avert your eyes if the messy business of next 250 dialogue is a bit much. Hopefully we’ll really get into it. 🇺🇸 🌎

[Justin Breitfelder @jbreitfelder]

https://t.co/l9ye6iOgUG

[Justin Breitfelder @jbreitfelder]

Pithy AI view in FT today really helped me see 2H 2020s macro outlook better — AI boom to be “massively disin­fla­tion­ary”, says Mike Hunstad @NTInvest, almost like monetary policy but better. FT added Fed vice-chair Jef­fer­son note to wait & see /@HClarfelt @senoj_erialc

[Justin Breitfelder @jbreitfelder]

Hunstad @NTInvest’s disinflationary AI view really started a great conversation with @FT. “AI should not drive today’s interest rate decisions” sayeth their editorial board today — US adoption < 1/5 for starters — but concedes the point in theory at least. Only time will tell.

[Justin Breitfelder @jbreitfelder]

@shiyam_kashfiq That’s the trillion dollar question, right? Where great fortunes will be won and lost in each industry

[Justin Breitfelder @jbreitfelder]

... Another key insight to the AI/macro outlook — basically much of the growth narrative will be around being able to actually deploy it. When I started marketing AI in 1999, at the beginning of my career, this is most of what we talked about. See also deployment failure rates.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Mark Cuban just described the largest wealth transfer of the AI era.

Almost nobody understood what he said.

Cuban: “There are 33 million companies in this country. Aren’t going to have AI budgets. Aren’t going to have AI experts.”

Not tech startups.

The shoe store. The regional trucking outfit. The accounting firm with 12 employees.

The businesses that actually run the physical economy.

They know AI is coming. They have no idea what to do with it.

Cuban: “You’ve got the head of Microsoft saying software is dead because everything’s going to be customized to your unique utilization.”

Software is dead.

The SaaS era ran on one rule. Build a generic product. Force millions of companies to bend their workflows around it. Charge rent forever.

AI ends the contract.

The business stops bending to the software. The intelligence bends to the business.

But customized by whom.

The third-generation manufacturer cannot tell Claude from Gemini. The county hospital is staring at a reactor asking where the light switch is.

Cuban: “Who’s going to do it for them?”

That question is worth more than the frontier models themselves.

Hundreds of billions are being burned to build the foundation. The smartest engineers alive are locked in a bloodbath over who owns the base layer.

Let them fight.

Let them burn the capital. Let them drive the cost of raw intelligence toward zero.

Because the wealth does not collect where the brain is built.

It collects where the brain meets the business.

Every ambitious kid in college right now thinks survival means a seat at OpenAI or Anthropic.

Cuban is staring at the other 99 percent of the economy.

Learn the models. Then learn the messy, unglamorous reality of how a 50-person company actually operates.

Walk through the door. Understand their problems. Wire the intelligence directly into their revenue.

That is not a job title. That is an entire economic class being born.

You do not need to build the brain. You need to build the nervous system.

The biggest winners of the electricity era were not the engineers who built the generators. They were the ones who walked into dark factories and showed the owners where to plug in.

33 million companies are standing in the dark right now.

Silicon Valley is racing to build the god. The fortunes will belong to whoever teaches him a trade.

[Justin Breitfelder @jbreitfelder]

@sashastiles So analog. Love it.

[Justin Breitfelder @jbreitfelder]

@sashastiles So cool. Print! Cheers to timestampted print.

[Justin Breitfelder @jbreitfelder]

Well said @sashastiles of years past — had similar feels about this moment in my own studies 20+ years ago. But didn’t think it would take this long to arrive. Please keep sifting & sharing. Curious to see more now.

[Sasha Stiles | AI alter ego Technelegy ✍️🤖 @sashastiles]

sifting through 20+ years of notes and scrawled curiosities/anxieties about the very moment we are living through

[Justin Breitfelder @jbreitfelder]

I was today years old when I first tweeted a @mcuban take. Guess I need to pay more attention. Good point I haven't seen elsewhere. Deserves more coverage, unpacking & development as a key storyline.

[Justin Breitfelder @jbreitfelder]

https://t.co/2hVacTek51

[Justin Breitfelder @jbreitfelder]

Fed all about labor in year ahead, ignoring inflation due to uncertainty how tariffs flow through. Just starting to see. We're creating one of greatest macro experiments in 150 years, hiking tariffs to highest in 100 years in world's largest economy. -@BobEUnlimited to @FerroTV

[Justin Breitfelder @jbreitfelder]

https://t.co/EZsTCsNct9

[Jim Bianco @biancoresearch]

Regarding my last comment about the Fed making a mistake, to be clear, the mistake is not cutting 50. The mistake is what Austan Goolsbee (Chicago Fed President) said after the cut ...
---
From Bloomberg …
https://t.co/kWAim5NwDd
Goolsbee noted borrowing costs are “hundreds” of basis points above neutral — a level of rates that neither stimulates nor restrains economic activity.

“Over the next 12 months, we have a long way to come down to get the interest rate to something like neutral to try to hold the conditions where they are,” Goolsbee said during the moderated discussion.
---
The chart below shows the Bloomberg Surprise Index. It is screaming higher, meaning the economy is beating expectations left and right.

Add to this the real possibility of a Trump victory, and with it more fiscal stimulus via tax cuts and deregulation, and inflation via tariffs, and monetary stimulus via rate cuts looks unnecessary.

[Justin Breitfelder @jbreitfelder]

Pithy explainer on why rates are rising so much after the big Fed rate cut — “the market thinks it’s a mistake.” Big time: “We have never seen long rates rise this much after a first-rate cut.“ See also mortgage rates, @biancoresearch tweet on Goolsbee “hundreds” comment.

[Jim Bianco @biancoresearch]

1/3

Bob is 💯

This chart shows the rise in long-rates never after a first-rate cut is unprecedented.

The market is rejecting the Fed's rate-cutting policy. Why?

* The economy is good
* Inflation is not "solved" (and tariffs are inflationary)
* Don't need monetary stimulus

[Justin Breitfelder @jbreitfelder]

Link: https://t.co/hQgdmGX5fX

[Justin Breitfelder @jbreitfelder]

Quote of the day on stimulus — “This is what happens when you feed the monster. Every day you need to increase the amount of food.” - @Aligarciaherrer in pithy piece on ebbing China rally by @Arjunneilalim @cheng_leng_ @edwardwhitenz Well said!

[Justin Breitfelder @jbreitfelder]

Rates higher indefinitely: Maybe they start cutting mid-year? Late 2024? But then only 100bps-ish? US adding twice as many jobs as expected to kickoff the new year, and “strong across the board.” Unemployment still well < 4%. Wages growing 4.5%. Strongest GDP growth in G7 by far.