Ghost stories
A gloomy AI memo went viral this week, briefly spooking markets. Whether true or not, two Australian tech stories today suggest the pressures it describes are real.
You might have seen a piece of speculative financial fiction doing the rounds this week from Citrini Research, written as a macro memo dated June 2028.
In the grim, dark future it lays out, artificial intelligence has hollowed out white-collar employment, the S&P is down 38% from its highs and the US unemployment rate has blown out to 10%.
The central mechanism behind this collapse is what Citrini calls “Ghost GDP” — AI-enhanced output that shows up in the national accounts but never really circulates through the real economy, because agentic systems don’t spend money on discretionary goods.
Each round of AI-driven efficiency funds the next round of AI investment, which enables the next round of job cuts, which suppresses more spending, which pushes more firms to cut costs with AI.
