Teeg Dougland

@arobertbitter

Most people go right as they get older. I keep going left. Must be dyslexic. I'm afraid I've got some bad news boys.

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Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Jul 4

creditbubblebulletin.blogspot.com/2026/07/week...

“McCarthyism.” “The Road to Serfdom.” Four crazy, likely unbelievable, months until the midterms. Rather than villainize the young far-left “democratic socialists”, it might be more productive to try to understand the impetus behind this movement.

Loose financial conditions and late-cycle blow-off excess continue to mask major social and economic upheaval. Today’s Gilded Age has turned toxic for large sections of our population. It may not yet be obvious, but we’ve neglected safeguarding Capitalism from dangerous malfunction. Contemporary finance has failed us. Fiscal policy is completely out of control, while monetary management negligently fostered inflationism, market dysfunction, and unprecedented monetary disorder.

The younger generation has good reason to feel cheated by my generation. Of course they will eventually revolt against a system of egregious wealth inequality - one they perceive as offering limited opportunity. Of course they will revolt against a system they, understandably, see as corrupt.

It’s sad, especially at our nation’s 250-year anniversary, to see growing numbers of young Americans rebuff Capitalism in favor of the alluring promise of fairness and equality. But labeling these fellow Americans “ruthless communists” and a “horrible threat of cancer” is as absurd as stating that the immigrant population are murders that eat the dogs and cats.

I was unfamiliar with Melat Kiros, the 29-year-old democratic socialist, who took down longtime Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette.

Kiros: “We have to root out the corruption and get money out of our politics. It’s about political will — and that means we have to vote out any of the incumbents that are standing in our way by taking that kind of corporate PAC money. I’m dead serious about this issue. We have to start setting a standard now.”

Listening to Ms. Kiros’ post-election comments, I was struck by her eloquence in conveying an anti-corruption message. I expect “anticorruption” to resonate almost as m…

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Jun 28

A man painting a picture of a Bank of America branch. The building is across the street and looks normal. He is painting it the same except in the picture it is on fire.

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Jun 21

It took less than a month after Microsoft went to usage-based pricing and OpenAI and Anthropic expanded their pricing changes for users to freak out. Funding is drying up and Anthropic and OpenAI's pending IPOs mean they need to get profitable. Fast.

THIS IS ABSOLUTELY INSANE.

A company's AI bill jumped 700% in a single day because Anthropic changed how it charged for AI usage.

Workato had been paying one flat monthly fee to use Anthropic's AI. In May, Anthropic moved them to pay per token pricing, where every single prompt costs real money. The bill went up 7 times overnight.

Its own CIO said AI companies had been subsidizing usage for years just to get everyone hooked, and the moment that stopped, the real cost hit all at once.

This is happening everywhere right now, not just at one company.

Amazon, Walmart, Cisco, Uber, and Meta are all now capping how much AI their own employees can use.

These are the exact companies that spent the last two years forcing AI onto every employee as fast as possible.

Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget by April and now caps employees at $1,500 a month.

Amazon told staff to stop using AI "just for the sake of using it" after engineers were caught running agents just to climb internal leaderboards.

JPMorgan published an internal note this month titled "AI Bills Are Out of Control." Some JPMorgan employees are reportedly spending more on AI every month than their own salary.

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Jun 12

Gary is right here. The AI shakeout will be led by massive price cutting. Inference providers will be pushed to use less cost intensive models and customers will be pushed into limits for all users to eliminate tokenmaxxing, which was probably over 50% of compute demand.

Original tweet from Gary Marcus was "This may be the beginning of the end."

This tweet from 14 hours ago is on track to get about a million views.

But here’s the thing: the conclusion is true, but the tweet itself is already outdated.

WSJ’s scoop that OpenAI is considering drastic price cuts - basically lighting money on fire to save customers – is further sign of weakness, and indicator of how much trouble OpenAI is in.

And when they go down, they will likely pull Nvidia and Oracle and Coreweave etc down with them.

Things are unraveling fast.

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Jun 12

Seems significant.

Story about how China has bought no Saudi crude oil for two months, and how this buyer strike is one major reason that the price of oil remains depressed. With no apparent reopening of the Strait of Hormuz on the horizon, China is likely to have to come back and order barrels at the worst possible time. And representatives from the Chinese energy agency are meeting Saudi representatives in Beijing. Somebody blinks first.

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Jun 5

This is a predictable result from the fall in the savings rate, which has massively accelerated since January. Inflation goes up, and people attempt to maintain spending, which increases nominal spending - see retail trade since January - and collapses the savings rate.

Graph of the personal savings rate, which has fallen from 4.3% to 2.5% since January.

Graph of retail sales growth Y/Y, which is not inflation adjusted, rising from 2.1% to 5.2% since January.

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Jun 2

www.nippon.com/en/japan-dat...

Japan's oil reserves have fallen 25%; from 360 million barrels to 270 million barrels, in the past month in a half. Outside of Japan and China, virtually all oil reserves in East Asia were exhausted at the end of May.

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· May 25

Cover of the fake album by Rodney Munch (song is ai generated and thus not linked) "It's time to take a shit on the company's dime." If you haven't spent at least an hour in your stall browsing on your phone, daydreaming, or making mental plans for future activities, you're not doing enough.

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· May 24

You don't post this sort of stuff if you are seriously negotiating with Iran.

Donald Trump post on Truth Social of a terrible AI generated image of a US Reaper drone blowing up an Iranian flagged ship. It has 130 bookmarks, 514 retweets, and 1.9k likes.

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· May 22

Yeah this is fun.

Template generated Star Trek TOS title card saying: "Godspeed You! Black Emperor"

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· May 11

One more

Regional map of the US with regions shaded to highlight the percentage of farmers in that region unable to afford all needed fertilizer due to shortages caused by the Strait of Hormuz being shut. Western Region: 66%; Midwest 48%; Northeast 69%; Southern 78%. Less fertilizer will lead to lower crop yields of 20-40%.

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· May 11

One graph.

Graph of visible oil inventories over time. From 2019-February 2026 inventories are between 8-9 million. Current inventories are 7.6 million and by September will hit the operational minimum of 6.8 billion barrels, meaning pipelines and refineries will not have enough oil in them to work properly, and they will have to be shut down.

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· May 7

BREAKING. S&P Global Energy published research on Tuesday May 5 2026 stating that even after the Strait of Hormuz reopens, it will take seven months minimum to fully restore upstream production, with the energy crisis potentially stretching into 2027.

The market is not pricing this.

Brent futures are pricing political resolution at the May 14 Trump-Xi summit. Physical cargoes are pricing the customs enforcement architecture. Both are pricing the war. Neither is pricing the aftermath.

The Strait reopening is not the end of the crisis. The Strait reopening is the moment the second phase begins.

Output at Iranian fields and export flows from Iraqi and lower Gulf fields have been disrupted for sixty-six days. Refinery turnaround schedules across Asia are now misaligned. Insurance markets have repriced. Shadow fleet logistics have been substantially degraded by US Treasury sanctions. None of this rebuilds in days.

The political clock measures the distance to summit. The architectural clock measures the distance to functional supply restoration. The two clocks are not the same clock.

Even if Trump and Xi de-escalate on May 14, S&P says the energy crisis lasts another seven months at minimum.

The peace itself has a seven-month tail.

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Apr 24

A study by Moody's last year found that 49% of all household spending was by the top 10% of households by income. Microsoft and Meta employees are likely in this group. If it's 49% of all spending, it's probably close to 70-80% of the DISCRETIONARY spending.

Corporate Bloodletting: Big Tech Layoffs While Markets Hit ATH
Meta cutting 10% of jobs (~8,000 employees)

Microsoft offering voluntary retirement to 7% of US workforce — first in 51-year history

Deloitte and KPMG also cutting staff

SoftBank seeking $10B loan backed by OpenAI shares to pay off bridge loan used to buy OpenAI shares. JustDario: "remarkable talent for scamming"

This while S&P trades at ATH. Don Durrett: "Read that slowly and then realize the S&P 500 is at an ATH and we are at war with Iran"

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Apr 24

This is very interesting to me because on the last day of the quarter, OpenAI "raised" $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation, and you KNOW SoftBank put its share on the balance sheet at that price. Shouldn't it be able to borrow freely against the collateral of that big valuable asset?

SoftBank is seeking a $10 billion loan against its OpenAI shares to assist in paying off a $40 billion bridge loan it obtained to buy OpenAI shares.

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Mar 29

The chaser.

Three months ago I wrote that someone was going to pay for this. That either it would be shareholders or the rest of us. I laid out the circular financing, the Enron comparisons, the 19-year leases for 1-year-obsolete hardware, the 95% failure rate, the grid that can’t cope, the CEOs who admit it’s a bubble while pouring money into it.

Every single number got worse since then.

I called my last article “The trillion-dollar oops”.

I don’t think “trillion” cuts it anymore. We’ve left a trillion behind. We’re in territory where the numbers are so large they’ve stopped being numbers and started being theology.

You don’t analyse them anymore. You believe in them, or you don’t.

…

Amen.

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Mar 29

In December I mentioned GPU rental prices had dropped 23%. That was quaint. H100 cloud pricing has now fallen 64-75% from late 2024 levels. From $8-10 per hour to $2.99. On marketplace providers like Vast.ai you can rent an H100 for $1.49 an hour. The chip that was supposed to underpin the AI revolution is now cheaper per hour than a cup of coffee in most Starbucks.

A100s? $0.75 an hour on some platforms.

And it’s about to get worse. Blackwell B200 GPUs are shipping now, which means the entire H-series is sliding toward commodity pricing. Previous-gen flagships typically see about 15% list-price cuts within six months of a new generation launch. The H100 hasn't looked down yet.

Remember that I mentioned that below $1.65/h the rental economics stopped working? Well, we’re way below that on the cheaper providers. The very infrastructure these companies are committing trillions to build is becoming uneconomical whilst they’re still building it.

It’s like when hotel rates are cratering and somehow you decide the solution is to build more hotels.

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Mar 29

Let's talk about Oracle, because Oracle is now my favourite financial horror story - which is saying something, given the competition.

The $248 billion in off-balance-sheet lease commitments I reported last time? That’s grown to $261 billion as of February. Still insane. Still off the balance sheet. Still not reflected in the numbers most investors look at.

But the numbers they CAN see are already bad enough. Oracle finished its fiscal year with $92.6 billion in total debt, then ratcheted that up to $108.1 billion after issuing $18 billion in new notes in September. Since then it’s issued another $43 billion in senior notes, created a $10 billion revolving credit facility, expanded its commercial paper programme, and issued mandatory convertible preferred stock. In February, Oracle announced its intent to raise up to $50 billion in debt and equity financing in a single calendar year. Within days, it raised $30 billion. The order book was “substantially oversubscribed”. Oracle’s $25 billion bond sale alone attracted $129 billion in buy orders.

Five times oversubscribed… For.. this..??

This bubble doesn't need a pin - it needs a mirror.

And in January, bondholders filed a class action lawsuit in Manhattan claiming Oracle knew it would need to raise significantly more debt when it sold $18 billion in bonds last September - and didn’t disclose it. Sure enough, seven weeks later Oracle went back for another $38 billion. The optics, as one analyst delicately noted, “aren’t great”.

Meanwhile, Oracle simultaneously announced a restructuring plan costing up to $1.6 billion. Primarily for employee severance. They’re firing people, being sued by bondholders, watching their stock halve, sitting on $261 billion in off-balance-sheet commitments, and raising $50 billion in new financing - all while telling everyone this is going according to plan.

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Mar 29

A whole year back, back all the way to December, the big five hyperscalers were spending $405 billion a year and I thought that number was already insane. I said it was accelerating. I said No1 knows what anything costs anymore. That these estimates kept getting revised upward so fast that by the time you finished reading the sentence, someone would have revised it again.

I thought I was joking. But increasingly this dimension has other ideas with reality. I was being prophetic.

The 2025 final tally came in at $443 billion for the top five, up 73% year-on-year. Fine. That’s the world we live in now. But the 2026 projections? CreditSights estimated about $600 billion in November. Then Q4 earnings calls hit and - in their own words - the guidance “blew away” their estimates. They raised it to $750 billion. Moody’s independently pegged it at $700 billion. This is the third consecutive year of growth exceeding 60%. And Moody’s projects $870 billion for 2027.

In what universe is this rational capital allocation? Well... in this one, apparently. Google co-founder Larry Page was quoted saying “I’m willing to go bankrupt rather than lose this race”.

At least someone’s being honest.

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Mar 5

Evergreen post.

Shaggy from Scooby Doo looking dejected saying "Every mystery we solve brings me closer to the realization that the only monsters in this world are pathetic old men trying to steal as much money as they can."

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Feb 26

This is truly amazing. This is the guy running a $5 trillion market cap company, and is not aware that most of his customers are subscription-based and do not charge by the token. 95% of Chat GPT users pay $0. When companies attempt to do so, they lose customers! www.theregister.com/2025/10/15/o...

The number of tokens that are being generated has really gone exponential. We need to inference at a much higher speed, and when you're inferencing at a much higher speed, and each one of those tokens are dollarized, it directly translates into revenues. Inference performance equals revenues for our customers. For the data centers, inference tokens per watt translates directly to the revenues of the CSPs. The reason for that is because everybody is power limited. I mean, no matter how many data centers you have, each data center, you know, 100 MW or 1 GW, has power limits. The architecture that has the best performance per watt translates, because each token, the performance tokens per watt, each token is dollarized.

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Feb 26

Reading the NVDA earnings call transcript. A couple hours ago while waiting I read the 2Q transcript. Wow. Like night and day. First question out of the gate:

Thanks for taking my question. I think you mentioned that you now have growth visibility into calendar 2027 also, and I think your purchase commitments kind of reflect that confidence. Jensen, I'm curious, you know, when you look at your top cloud customers, cloud CapEx close to $700 billion this year, many investors are concerned that it would be harder for this level to grow into next year, and for several of them, their cash flow generation capability is also getting compressed. I know you're very confident about your roadmap, right? And your purchase commitments and whatnot, but how confident are you about your customers' ability to continue to grow their CapEx?If their CapEx doesn't grow, can NVIDIA still find a way to grow, in that, envelope? Thank you.

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Feb 23

Seems like this little tidbit should have not been buried so deep in the article, or maybe should have been part of the original news article announcing the sale. Or maybe should have also mentioned Kuvare is not an insurance company, but a asset manager that sells assets TO insurance companies.

One aspect of Blue Owl's sale did raise some eyebrows, as Bloomberg reported one of the buyers for its assets included Kuvare, a Chicago-based insurer Blue Owl acquired in 2024. Like Blue Owl, Apollo (APO), Ares (ARES), Blackstone (BX), KKR & Co. (KKR), and other major private credit lenders own insurance companies.

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Jan 4

After eight paragraphs of stenography where they simply repeat what the Trump administration says with no criticism, a wild thought appears.

"It is unclear how Trump plans to oversee Venezuela. U.S. forces have no control over the country itself, and Maduro's government appears not only to still be in charge but to have no appetite for cooperating with Washington. Trump did not say who will lead Venezuela when the U.S. cedes control."

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Nov 4

Over 80% of people in the country in recession.

A graph showing only 20% of the country lives in an area where GDP is increasing, or 80% of the country is in a recession.

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Oct 28

Frodo: I wish it need not have happened in my time.
Gandalf (hitting his weed pen for the 18th time in the past hour): Haha. Hahaha. Fuck.

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Oct 12

I first read the Phantom Tollbooth when I was 8 and it was THE formative book in my life. This passage has kept me going gotten me through every depression and every crisis.

"It has been a long trip," said Milo, climbing onto the couch where the princesses sat; "but we would have been here much sooner if I hadn't made so many mistakes. I'm afraid it's all my fault." "You must never feel badly about making mistakes," explained Reason quietly, "as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons." "But there's so much to learn," he said, with a thoughtful frown. "Yes, that's true," admitted Rhyme; "but it's not just learning things that's important. It's learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things at all that matters." "That's just what I mean," explained Milo, as Tock and the exhausted bug drifted quietly off to sleep. "Many of the things I'm supposed to know seem so useless that I can't see the purpose in learning them at all." "You may not see it now," said the Princess of Pure Reason, looking knowingly at Milo's puzzled face, "but whatever we learn has a purpose and whatever we do affects everything and everyone else, if even in the tiniest way. Why, when a housefly flaps his wings, a breeze goes round the world; when a speck of dust falls to the ground, the entire planet weighs a little more; and when you stamp your foot, the earth moves slightly off its course. Whenever you laugh, gladness spreads like the ripples in a pond; and whenever you're sad, no one anywhere can be really happy. And it's much the same thing with knowledge, for whenever you learn something new, the whole world becomes that much richer." "And remember, also," added the Princess of Sweet Rhyme, "that many places you would like to see are just off the map and many things you want to know are just out of sight or a little beyond your reach. But someday you'll reach them all, for what you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow."

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Oct 12

The stock market bubble in 2025 is nearly double that of 2000.

A graph of market cap to GDP ratio. In 2000 it was over 125%. In 2025 it is 220.8%.

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Oct 10

Potential Trigger #4: Private equity liquidity crisis. The rest of the article, and how little supposedly informed investors knew, is really scary. finance.yahoo.com/news/first-b...

Teeg Dougland@arobertbitter· Oct 4

Jesus. Lenders can't see financial unless you sign an NDA. "It's a feature not a bug." money.usnews.com/investing/ne...