_{BUYSIDERS MACRO MEMO}

The Consequences of Controlled Stupidity

June 30, 2028 - 9:00pm // Midtown Manhattan

The unemployment rate printed at 4.3% today, right in line with expectations. The market held steady on the news, and the Dow is sitting comfortably at 60,000.

Traders and their Claude bots predicted this months ago. In fact, Bill Ackman’s AI assistant called the exact points on the Dow three weeks ago for today’s unemployment print.

M&A and capital markets remain hot. As a shock to everyone, Altman actually pulled off spending $3 trillion of CapEx for OpenAI, and other AI companies followed suit.

Think back to two years ago… Claude single-handedly tore down the entire market - causing a sell off in every industry and a panic across the Street - when people thought analysts would be replaced.

Instead, your DCFS have grown from 5 scenarios to 500. What used to take analysts 4 hours now takes you 4 minutes, so the expectations for your work product have increased.

You were told investment banking hours would improve with AI, yet you are still at the office until 3am.

Sure, you’re not manually editing Excel files anymore - an art lost to time - but now, you have to parse through the 25 bad responses your Bank’s AI bot “Jerome" - named after a Fed Chair of a bygone era - gives you, because you didn’t phrase your prompt correctly.

Mercifully, your bank has replaced all compliance, AML, KYC and a majority of its accounting staff with AI bots. So when your MD comes to you and asks you to onboard a client for his “newest long-shot deal”, you are able to get it approved in minutes without the back and forth.

As you take the elevator to get your DoorDashed slop bowl (ordered and delivered by your AI bot based on your recent health trends), you ride past the offices of a few casualties from the AI explosion.

No one expected such casualties from this AI boom; however, SaaS companies went belly up (causing KKR to be rolled up by Apollo), Blue Owl went bust, and SoftBank became the best investor in the world (after their equity investment in OpenAI and follow-on investment in Anthropic mooned following their IPOs).

The offices of what used to be Deloitte and EY now sit empty, as relics from a pre-AI consulting world. Naturally, consulting had been the next victim after the SaaS-pocalypse. After all, increasing revenue and cutting costs to “add shareholder value” is basic math.

After picking up your food, you have a notification from “Jerome” that he’s integrated the latest Monte Carlo scenario into your model. BlackRock is happy. Then, he reminds you that he will do a price refresh tomorrow, after Treasury Secretary Dimon’s speech.

Once upstairs, you settle in to wrap up another pitch for your MD, knowing it will go nowhere. You begin crafting the perfect prompt for “Jerome” knowing that one typo or hint of bias will ruin the whole night.

In the end, the AI boom simply boosted productivity, like Excel did in the ‘80s… and the internet did in the ‘90s… It just accomplished it at a scale never seen before. MDs and clients adjusted their expectations accordingly.

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_{NEWS ROUNDUP}

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