The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis – a finance-oriented vignette

• AI News Team
• February 23, 2026

​Published on February 23, 2026 5:12 PM GMTA popular (#1 in Substack’s Finance category) financial analyst – Citrini – published a “Macro Memo from June 2028” plotting a potential future of increasing AI capabilities, with a focus on financial markets.This is not a person who has typically engaged in the usual LW discourse, making this an interesting outsider’s perspective.Some extracts:The unemployment rate printed 10.2% this morning, a 0.3% upside surprise. The market sold off 2% on the number, bringing the cumulative drawdown in the S&P to 38% from its October 2026 highs. The euphoria was palpable. By October 2026, the S&P 500 flirted with 8000, the Nasdaq broke above 30k. The initial wave of layoffs due to human obsolescence began in early 2026, and they did exactly what layoffs are supposed to. Margins expanded, earnings beat, stocks rallied. Record-setting corporate profits were funneled right back into AI compute.The headline numbers were still great. Nominal GDP repeatedly printed mid-to-high single-digit annualized growth. Productivity was booming. Real output per hour rose at rates not seen since the 1950s, driven by AI agents that don’t sleep, take sick days or require health insurance.The owners of compute saw their wealth explode as labor costs vanished. Meanwhile, real wage growth collapsed. Despite the administration’s repeated boasts of record productivity, white-collar workers lost jobs to machines and were forced into lower-paying roles.When cracks began appearing in the consumer economy, economic pundits popularized the phrase “Ghost GDP“: output that shows up in the national accounts but never circulates through the real economy. By early 2027, LLM usage had become default. People were using AI agents who didn’t even know what an AI agent was, in the same way people who never learned what “cloud computing” was used streaming services. They thought of it the same way they thought of autocomplete or spell-check – a thing their phone just did now.There are other specific sections on bonds, stocks, private credit, sector-specific impacts, job numbers, and different geographiesLinks to other vignettes:https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-looks-likehttps://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t7zd5EupH4JjcxRH4/dave-kasten-s-agi-by-2027-vignetteDiscuss ​Read More