Albert Edwards, Chief Strategist at Société Générale, warned in his latest report of striking similarities between the current AI investment frenzy and the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. He pointed out that AI capital inflows are far outpacing productivity improvements, and a disruption in the supply of cheap capital supporting AI expansion would detonate a debt "time bomb."

Edwards emphasized that total factor productivity (TFP) data, which measures the actual benefits of technology, has shown no improvement to date, yet global AI capital expenditure has surged, with Goldman Sachs projecting it to exceed $1 trillion by 2026. Meanwhile, OpenAI's annualized revenue was disclosed to be below expectations, causing the Nasdaq index to plummet over 1% that day. He believes that AI tech giants are borrowing heavily, requiring the bond market to absorb hundreds of billions of dollars in new debt, a logic identical to Asia's reliance on short-term dollar borrowing to sustain prosperity in the 1990s. Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee had previously warned about the challenge of sluggish productivity.