nancy

My everything account. Ex -global equity PM . My snide mkt, econ & political comments - @NC798322.

[nancy @langwiser]

@USATRUMPMAN1 Annapolis

[nancy @langwiser]

@UnicusResearch Problem if they lose their jobs - have to immediately repay loans

[nancy @langwiser]

@jimiuorio Actually , a management who didn’t want to hear what employees thought of their malpractice.

[nancy @langwiser]

This is why students using AI will make them dumb

[Michael Strong @flowidealism]

A weightlifting coach would never lift weights for the athlete; the athlete must lift them. Similarly, children must do the thinking themselves—the active intellectual work

[nancy @langwiser]

Only if they think they can flip it. The terms are outrageous - valuation, governance, too much fantasy

[Tracey Ryniec @TraceyRyniec]

Why? None of the pros want in?

[nancy @langwiser]

@charliebilello You shouldn’t care about the past, only the future

[nancy @langwiser]

I agree

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

There is a huge difference in quality of work product created by someone who did the task before AI vs someone who has only ever used AI to do that specific task

For example, an engineer who wrote code before ChatGPT seems to have a much better grip and fundamental understanding vs someone who just learned to vibe code using AI

This is the simple reason why I believe AI will never fully replace humans

[nancy @langwiser]

@bertie_lakeland People have lost their minds

[nancy @langwiser]

@chrismartenson The inventories are getting low enough that spot demand is going to drive prices.

[nancy @langwiser]

@matthewstoller 🤣🤣🤣. Neither are tokens

[nancy @langwiser]

@awealthofcs The SPX is getting a boost from semis and investors mesmerized by strong earning (and seem not to realize that the Iran War is going to undermine future earnings.) The AI stock story is starting to show holes so people likely are taking some huge gains off the table (if smart)

[nancy @langwiser]

@lisaabramowicz1 Tech cos are all into replacing programmers with AI

[nancy @langwiser]

@Eric_Schmitt You likely want a civilization that most people would find horrendous

[nancy @langwiser]

@charliebilello A lot of the underperformance has to do with the currency. When the dollar is weak foreign stocks and bonds get a huge lift. Depending on the costs of hedging the differential is not as large

[nancy @langwiser]

@INArteCarloDoss Will they ever make money?

[nancy @langwiser]

@flowidealism The Ivy admission rate is crazy. It would be higher if they limited applications to people who actually have a chance at getting accepted. The admissions office have a really good idea of who will succeed based on many factors not just SATs. Some stand out for unique reasons

[nancy @langwiser]

@VladTheInflator Trump

[nancy @langwiser]

@TraceyRyniec Is forming? It’s more like a rolling top with the past AI momentum fading and people just mesmerized by the action in the semi stocks. All the circular financing is going to be where everyone gets this wrong. How can six big AI players make money if none of them is “greatest”

[nancy @langwiser]

The story just gets worse - The stocks are acting terrible - are investors having doubts? I do.

[George Noble @gnoble79]

NVIDIA IS BUYING ITS OWN CHIPS AND CALLING IT REVENUE

And your retirement account is secretly holding the bag.

This scheme is literally straight out of the Enron playbook...

In January 2026, a special purpose vehicle called Valor Compute Infrastructure was created with one purpose:

Buy Nvidia's chips so Nvidia could book the sale as revenue.

Valor raised $5.4 billion and purchased over 100,000 of Nvidia's GB200 GPUs.

But $1.9 billion of that money came FROM Nvidia itself.

Nvidia invested $1.9 billion into the shell company, then sold that same shell company $5.4 billion worth of its own chips and booked every dollar as revenue.

It's the Girl Scout whose dad bought all the cookies and then she wins the sales contest because Dad was the customer. Except this Girl Scout is a trillion-dollar company and the cookie sale is $5.4 billion.

But it gets MUCH worse:

The remaining $3.5 billion in financing came from Apollo Global Management. Apollo structured the debt, packaged it into securities, and then sold those securities to Athene.

And guess who Athene is? Apollo's OWN insurance subsidiary. The one that sells fixed annuities to American retirees as safe, conservative retirement products.

Follow the chain:

Nvidia funds a shell company with $1.9 billion. The shell company buys $5.4 billion in Nvidia chips. Apollo finances the remaining $3.5 billion. Apollo sells the debt to its own insurance arm. That insurance arm packages it into annuity products and sells them to retirees who think they're buying something safe.

The retirees have no idea that their retirement savings are now backed by 100,000 computer chips sitting in some data center that will be worth pennies on the dollar in three years.

Now look at what's happening inside Athene:

$74.2 billion in US reserves but $217 billion in assets have been shifted to a Bermuda-based captive insurer, outside normal US regulatory oversight.

$103 billion of that portfolio (roughly 35%) is classified as Level 3 assets. That means there is no observable market price.

These assets are valued by internal models, not by actual markets.

And sitting on top of all those unpriced assets? 16.6x leverage.

If you're getting flashbacks to 2008, you should be.

Back then it was mortgages bundled into securities that nobody understood, sold to investors who had no idea what they were holding, rated as safe by agencies that never looked under the hood.

Today it's GPU-backed securities. Computer chips bundled into structured credit instruments, routed through an offshore insurance subsidiary, and sold to you as a retirement product.

The collateral is 100,000 GPUs leased to a single customer through an xAI subsidiary. If xAI stops making lease payments for any reason - financial distress, a pivot in strategy, anything - the entire structure unravels.

And Nvidia releases new architectures every year, so each generation delivers dramatically more compute per watt. A 5 year lease on technology that's obsolete in 2 years creates a mismatch that should terrify every annuity holder in America.

Every single step in this chain is technically legal. The SPV is legal, the lease is legal, Nvidia's equity stake is legal, the securitization is legal, and the Bermuda transfer is legal.

But legality and legitimacy are not the same thing.

I've seen every trick Wall Street has ever pulled in my 45 years of doing this.

And what I'm looking at right now is a pipeline that takes AI infrastructure risk, launders it through 8 layers of financial engineering, and deposits it in the retirement accounts of Americans who never agreed to fund Elon Musk's data centers.

In 2008 it was mortgage-backed securities.

In 2026 it's GPU-backed securities.

Different asset. Same greed. With the same ending.

[nancy @langwiser]

@UnicusResearch Wha t a joke. They should be forced to put money up for lying