jrehor

There is a bit of nuance to the cashflow. That $100 bn cashflow was used for something else before AI: mostly share repurchases and M&A. Now it's being redirected to capex. That removes some of the support for the stock prices; there's no longer a multibillion dollar bid every year for GOOG / META / MSFT etc. stocks.

But you're right that this shouldn't affect lenders, unless we see a lot more borrowing (which is coming, BTW: ORCL and GOOG just issued $10+ bn debt each for AI data centers).

Andreas Antonopoulos' books Mastering Bitcoin and Mastering Ethereum are fantastic. I'd recommend starting with those to get a good handle on the basics.

There are two failure modes of this strategy.

1. New information comes to light, the stock crashes, and you realize you were wrong and the stock is a dog. You no longer want to own it at the strike price. Oops. You effectively bought it above your updated estimate of its worth.

2. The stock keeps rising and rising, you collect the option premium but you could have made a lot more money if you just bought the damn thing outright.

These are more subtle failures than the usual "Oh my God, I blew up my account!" but they're real.

It's perfectly fine to keep doing what you're doing if you're comfortable with this risk. There is no strategy without a downside.

We did a half ass job. Everybody outside of East Asia did a half ass job or less.

Warning: etymonline.org goes to a sketchy black hole. The correct URL is etymonline.com

The US has too much retail space. Per capita, it has 5x as much as Europe (23.5 sq ft in the US vs 3-4 sq ft in most European countries) and 8-10x as much as Asia (2-3 sq ft). We may be looking at a permanent decrease as a result of this pandemic. But even if it goes down by 20%, the US will still have way more than anywhere else.

I think we'll be better off when we use the excess retail space for something else whether it's apartments, warehouses, or offices. But the transition will be painful.