Jim Rickards, who used to advise the Pentagon, ran the math on the AI boom and landed on a number: 17. As in, he figures today’s frenzy is the dotcom bubble times 17. He’s old enough to remember the last one. Companies with no revenue and a domain name, priced like they’d already won. Then 2000 showed up and handed the whole thing a kick to the teeth.
His point in the GlobeNewswire piece isn’t that AI is fake. The internet wasn’t fake either. It’s that the technology can be real and the prices can still be nuts at the same time. History doesn’t repeat, he says. It rhymes. And this rhyme is a big one.
Your 401(k) is the one holding the bag here. If you own an S&P 500 index fund, a handful of AI names (Nvidia, Microsoft, the usual crew) now make up a chunk of it so large that a 2000-style unwind wouldn’t be a sector problem. It’d be your problem.
Rickards is selling a forecast, not a fact, so don’t liquidate on a soundbite. But if the ending does rhyme, the money that survives dotcom-style busts is the money that wasn’t all crammed into the same five tickers. Worth checking what percentage of your “diversified” fund actually is.
The “17 times bigger than dotcom” number is doing a lot of work in that headline, and nobody selling it can tell you when the clock runs out. That’s the whole trick with bubble calls. Rickards might be dead right about the ending and still be three years early, which for anyone holding the stuff is the same as being wrong.
The 2000 crowd knew the internet would change everything too. They were correct. Pets.com still went to zero.
Sources: globenewswire.com
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