Today, I want to speak about how AI is creating a kind of split reality, a split reality around

productivity. It seems to be creating, increasing and improving productivity at the individual

level, but how much is it impacting firms and the wider economy yet? Now, do stay to the end

because there is a surprising bit of data

that throws more light, perhaps more confusion, on all of this. So let's get started. Why does

this question matter anyway? Well, if you've watched the stock market this week, you will know

exactly why. The mood around the AI boom turned sour over the NASDAQ and the

S&P 500, there have been several days of red. Key stocks that have enjoyed incredible gains in the last

couple of years and the last few months took an absolute pounding amongst them the hypers, the cloud companies like Oracle

and Corweave and Nebius who are in operation to serve up these AI models for companies like

OpenAI and others really, really in a sea of red. And even the hardware companies, like Vertive, which makes

cooling for data centers, having a really, really tough and torrid week. In another part of

the market, not the equity market, the bond market, we saw similar fear emerging. The bond market

tends to move slightly differently to the equity markets, but a number of

these companies in the AI space are dependent on corporate debt because you're having to raise

a lot of money to build out these big data centers.

And so for one example, Oracle's corporate debt took a real hammering down 8% this

week. And the CDS, which is a kind of interesting technical financial instrument, it's the cost

to ensure the debt of some of these companies spike. It got increasingly more expensive. And that's

often a signal that bond investors are a bit

nervous about the prospects of those firms. Now, in truth, the NASDAQ is still above its 50-day

moving average and this is often just the normal ups and downs, but perhaps it isn't. Now, the real

...