Jamie Dimon called it “close to as good as it gets” while his bank posted the highest quarterly profit in U.S. history. JPMorgan’s record haul — powered by an AI infrastructure financing frenzy that bankers now call a “super cycle” — coincided with IBM suffering its worst single-day crash since Lyndon Johnson was in the White House.
That’s the thing about super cycles: somebody always gets super-crushed.
The Great Disconnect
Goldman Sachs shares hit an all-time high after equities trading revenue of $7.42 billion — every analyst estimate in the trash can. Bank of America has raised roughly half a trillion dollars for AI-related companies since last year. Citi made $70 million on one deal alone (the SK Hynix ADR).
Meanwhile, IBM lost a quarter of its value in a single day. CEO Arvind Krishna blamed customers shifting budgets from software services to — wait for it — buying more hardware for AI. So the AI capex buildout is crushing the very companies trying to profit from it. That’s not a cycle. That’s a ouroboros in a top hat.
Kill the Messenger
The banks aren’t betting on AI. They’re betting on the betting. They collect fees on every SPAC, every IPO, every debt issuance whether the data center delivers a single watt of useful compute or not. SpaceX’s $86 billion IPO alone generated more in banking fees than most Fortune 500 companies earn in a year.
When the AI hangover comes — and software companies getting cannibalized by hardware spending is a heck of a signal — the banks will already have booked the fees. The losses belong to the limited partners, the pension funds, and the retail bag holders who bought the “super cycle” narrative.
Don’t take it personally…
just COMICS.
Related Reading
Still catching up? Read the origin story of this madness in Bubble.exe: Wall Street’s $725 Billion A.I. Fever Dream and the collateral damage in Shell Shocked: Wall Street’s $85 Oil Panic.
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