this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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Hey guys, so not all bubbles are the same. When the housing bubble burst, there were tons of debt that tied the housing bubble to wallstreet and big banks which tied in mainstreet to the bubble. When that bubble crashed, it put banks in jeopardy and THAT would have brought the whole financial system and main street down. We'd have been seeing bank runs, and the whole economy would've ground to a halt. That's when the bailout happened. Anyone remember dot-com bubble? When the dot-com bubble burst there were no bailouts. Companies just went under.
Current AI bubble is funded by the gynormous profits and funds that big tech companies have - Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, etc. who have humongous cash reserves and profits that they are literally plowing into building AI data centers which in turn fuels Nvidia's gynormous profits which it is plowing back into other AI companies. Nvidia doesn't have debt. Big tech companies aren't highly leveraged. When it crashes, it will go the way of dot-com.
After so many years of financial education being "save early, save often" and "put your money in index funds to diversify" and "historically the US stock market has only gone up over long enough periods of time" there is a sizeable amount of retirement funds riding on this bubble. In the year 2000, the average 401k balance was a little under $60k (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-aug-14-fi-33836-story.html) and that has now ballooned to $326k (https://www.empower.com/the-currency/life/average-401k-balance-age).
The bailout will be sold as protecting retirement funds, even though the median 401k balance is far lower than the average and even though people nearing retirement should have a higher mix of bonds instead of stocks anyway.