Debt Has Entered the A.I. Boom

if there are assets to put up as collateral, then debt is cheaper than equity. hard to see the point of this? also, debt is leverage, it leverages you, you don't leverage it.

Debt is the main culprit in any bubble.

Now we have 2nd order borrowing: where market caps are responding positively to news of "successful" borrowing and spending, encouraging more.

And 3rd order: Where the most "successful" borrowers get viewed as winners, and given disproportionately greater access to more debt. Making accelerated money burning an absolute survival-level hamster wheel necessity.

Any system that increased borrowing costs for leveraged market caps across an industry (i.e. caps with high multiples, growing quickly), would benefit everybody.

For the speculative companies, a cooling of borrowing would (1) act as a kind of arms control, maintaining competition but tilting efforts toward technical innovation vs. "financial innovation", (2) reduce the self-inflicted inflation a hot industry creates on its own inputs, and (3) reducing the risk of a major global financial crash for everybody.

Watching 2 and 3 happen in real time is crazy. Companies are being considered more successful just because of the level of capital commitments they are willing to sign and not because fundamentals. Which of course I know there’s more to it than that but the order of magnitude of the commitments and debt is mind boggling.