American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn
Millenarian thinking permeates business and markets
Photograph: Brett RyderCharles Mackay’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” (1841) is reviled by historians and revered among traders.
The book is best known for its colourful passages on Tulip mania in the 17th century and the South Sea bubble in the 18th.
But those wanting to understand business in the 21st should instead turn to Mackay’s chapter on the “epidemic terror of the end of the world”.
Apocalyptic thinking is the strongest impulse in American capitalism today.
Elon Musk, a character who could be straight from Mackay’s pages, will soon float SpaceX, a rocket company whose professed mission is to avert existential threats to humanity by establishing a colony on Mars.
Mr Musk is America’s richest capitalist in part because he is its loudest Cassandra.
Mr Musk is rushing to list before two other prophets with similarly millenarian worldviews.
Anthropic filed paperwork for a public offering this week.
Dario Amodei, its boss, has made much of the destructive potential of his firm’s Mythos model, which has thus far been kept from the public.
OpenAI, run by Sam Altman, will probably file its paperwork soon.
The lab recently published a utopian plan for the social contract after (or, rather, under) AI.
American business nowadays is best segmented not by industry but eschatology.
The threat of war looms nearly as large in business as that of AI.
Last year Alex Karp, the boss of Palantir, authored a book arguing that the future of the West depends on high-tech defence companies such as his own.
Palmer Luckey, the founder of Anduril, another defence-tech outfit, often talks up his expectation that China will try to invade Taiwan.
Every firm selling critical minerals has a compelling story for why theirs would become painfully scarce in the event of such a conflict.
Much of Wall Street is in a fatalistic mood.
Investor withdrawals from hitherto unknown private-credit funds recently shook faith in all of private markets.
The list of financial innovations central bankers say pose “systemic” risks to the economy is so long it’s hard to believe the system hasn’t collapsed under the weight of its own anxiety.
One of these, cryptocurrency, is itself an intrinsically apocalyptic endeavour, since it claims to offer protection against government control and inflation caused by Uncle Sam’s spending—on, among other things, defence.
Dates of previous calamities assume almost superstitious significance.
The most read book on Wall Street last year was called “1929”.
A good bet for this year is “1873”.
Traders describe the stockmarket in terms of previous catastrophes.
“Will 1999 turn into 2000 or 1987?
Or will the clock reset back to 1996?” wrote a strategist at Deutsche Bank this week.
That’s before one even considers the prospect of a 1973.
And surely a 1999 would increase the likelihood of another 2008?
A millenarian economy is necessarily a paranoid one.
The appearance of comets has often foretold the end of the world.
Nowadays a website tracks the private jets of the super-rich, supposedly because they would flee to safety in the event of a catastrophe.
Economists anxiously examine America’s remarkably resilient economic data for the mark of “K”, the idea that the economy is unsustainably propped up by the super-rich while everybody else languishes.
Permitting disputes have become questions of national survival.
“It’s over, we’re done folks,” warned the governor of Utah if America were to cede ground to China in AI (his constituents are up in arms about a massive data centre in the state backed by Kevin O’Leary, a TV-star best-known for appearing on “Shark Tank”).
Issues of contract have assumed cosmic importance.
“I apologise, but the fate of civilisation is at stake,” Mr Musk wrote to Mr Altman as they quarrelled over the governance of OpenAI.
Debates about regulating business have taken an evangelical turn.
Peter Thiel, a tech investor, says AI will summon the Antichrist in the form of authoritarian rules.
“Merely regulating it is insufficient,” wrote Pope Leo XIV in a 40,000-word essay on AI last month.
“It must be disarmed.”
A new tune by Charli XCX, a British pop star, captures both the papal and the popular mood: “Spring, Summer ‘26/When the world is gonna end, no hope for any of it/Yeah, we’re walkin’ on a runway that goes straight to hell.”
If things are so dire, why are American stocks so expensive?
It is often said that American markets today are a triumph of greed over fear.
But this gets things the wrong way around.
Firms are raising capital in proportion to the intensity of their apocalyptic vision, and are rushing to do so before the impending market collapse many of them expect.
Fear of missing out has been replaced with something more hysterical.
The instinct to accumulate capital is greater if one believes one’s labour will soon become worthless, as some hedge-fund types think.
They are betting the house. But their portfolios are often indistinguishable from those who think that is nonsense.
Other than tech stocks, what else can they buy?
If AI does create a new economy, it will be a fast-growing one where bonds are worth less because of inflation and higher interest rates.
If it doesn’t, it will wreck the existing economy and bonds will be worth even less.
Every investor is an acolyte, whether they believe it or not.
The best of times, the worst of times
It is possible for a country to worry itself into irrelevance.
But America is an experiment in terrifying oneself to riches.
Predictions of total and irreversible change certainly have their uses: there is no stronger pitch to investors than claiming your business will end the world as we know it.
That said, an economy which combines widespread distrust of business with a growing elite millenarianism is also a combustible one.
Perhaps the danger is not 2008, 1999, 1973 or even 1873, but 1789.
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