… as hundreds of billions of dollars are flooding into artificial intelligence, there are serious concerns that an AI bubble could trigger another bailout with taxpayer money.
In the interview that follows, leading progressive economist Gerald Epstein, who initiated and directs the Game Changers project at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, talks about AI’s impact on finance and the bailout problem and how a transformative public finance strategy can revive democracy, promote equity and social justice, and build strong and sustainable communities.
Short of a complete societal rejection of the global economic regime, there is no way for us to not be. The expensive deals have been inked. The money has been committed. Parties will be in debt to each other for hundreds of billions of dollars. It doesn’t matter if there is a law against taxpayers footing the bill or not, that amount of economic pressure will burst into and flood the larger economy and it will harm us all. It’s going to happen no matter what. We’re not yet angry enough at the severe economic harm that is about to befoul all of us.
Yeah, I am rather amazed that it seems so fashionable to want the AI bubble to pop, as if we won’t all be in the direct line of fire. It’s like people that were wishing for the housing bubble to pop back in the mid-00s…the people at the top doing all this shit are not going to be the ones that suffer.
I’d rather the AI bubble were to spin down and have a soft landing, but honestly, I have no idea if that is even remotely possible. It seems we cannot just have a stable economy; it’s either tulip bulb mania or it’s in freefall because the investor class is not making quite as much money as they think they are entitled to.