We just point out the patterns; we don't try to explain them.

Once again, we’ve seen the two defining rules of markets in 2025 and 2026 (so far):

1. There is no jump scare so trivial and obviously absurd that it can’t panic investors, as long as it invokes the proper boogeymen.

Recent case in point: [discussed here and here.]

Allison Morrow of CNN: 

I put “report” in quotes because this 7,000-word screed amounted to little more than AI fan fiction — a dystopian thought experiment imagining a scenario in which AI is so successful it actually contracts economic growth and drives US unemployment rate to more than 10% by 2028. It went viral in a similar way as Matt Shumer’s similarly long-winded “Something Big Is Happening” blog post earlier this month, with people who are incentivized to make AI scary sharing it in “see I told you so” posts as if they were Prometheus bringing fire to the people. (I’ll get into this a bit more later this week, but suffice to say memos of this genre tend to have some blindspots, both substantive and stylistic). 

 

I could have spent my day debunking or otherwise making sense of the Citrini report but I — and I can’t stress this enough — did not want to. Instead, I’ll share some of the reactions from people much smarter than I am. 

 Matt Levine of Bloomberg:

I was writing specifically about a tiny company that had pivoted from karaoke to AI logistics and announced a disruptive AI logistics thing. (“I would probably be more inclined to be skeptical that this particular company is gonna be the one to disrupt the industry,” said an analyst, but added that someone probably will.) But of course you don’t even have to run the company that announces the disruptive thing. At this point, simply saying, publicly, “hey I think AI will disrupt _____,” for some company or industry or whatever, has a decent chance of driving down the price of _____. The market is really jumpy!

Obviously in all of these things it helps for your announcement to be well-written, well-reasoned and generally jazzy. But I have never seen a market where it has been so easy for an activist short to have a big impact. Like I feel like you could go on financial television today and say a company’s name, pause meaningfully, say “AI,” pause meaningfully, and walk off, and the company’s stock would drop 10%. Try it!  “DoorDash. AI. [grim nod].”

 

2. No matter how big the threat, or how serious the damage it can do to the economy and long-term corporate profits, investors will forget about it in less than forty-eight hours.

A very partial list includes:

Tariffs;

Attacks on the Fed;

Devastating the agricultural and construction workforce;

The kind of increasingly erratic behavior from a chief executive that ought to terrify investors;

And now a war that will almost certainly disrupt world trade, possibly for months to come.

 

Which brings us to Monday. 

If you would have checked premarket trading a few hours before the opening bell that morning, you would have seen all of the major indices down a little short of two points. 

Had you checked back later that day, you would have seen this:

 There is, of course, an upper (or should it be lower?) bound to the magnitude of badness that can be shrugged off, but I have a feeling we'll be getting to that later.