The US economy is experiencing a “selective recession” where lower-income Americans are struggling due to rising costs and dwindling savings, while upper-income consumers remain unaffected. Inflation, although cooling down, has significantly impacted the purchasing power of lower and middle-income individuals. With the pandemic savings having been depleted for most Americans, recession fears are now growing as the job market weakens and interest rates remain high.
I do expect that the AI bubble bursting could be a catalyst for a serious market crash. Tech companies are basically carrying the whole market, and a lot of investor confidence comes from AI wet dreams. This tech has been hyped to the moon at this point, and while there are useful things language models can do, they’re far more limited than lay people realize. Once they start trying to replace workers with them, it’s going to be a similar shit show to the whole outsourcing craze in early 2000s. In fact, there are a lot of parallels here as there was a big Y2K crash, and then a ton of excitement with shipping tech jobs to places like India. It went on for a few years, and then it became clear that it wasn’t a workable model.