Is the Risk-On Trade Breaking Down? | Macro Mondays: September 14, 2026

Mikkel Rosenvold (0:06)

Hello there, welcome to Real Vision, welcome to Macro Mondays. My name is Mikkel Rosenvold. I'm joined as usual by Andreas Steno. And I have to say, Andreas, this has been quite a weekend and quite a Monday. I have a feeling everything is coming tumbling down right now. Oil is at 120, 110

The AI train seems to be stopping. We're entering hiking season. Summer is ending. The weather is horrible. Andreas, how fucked are we right now?

Andreas Steno (0:37)

Well, I actually turned pretty upbeat Friday afternoon when I saw a pretty muted reaction to that CPI print, which was admittedly a bit hotter than what we expected. And then Dario fucked up my weekend, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, to the extent where, you know, he basically wrote that the internet could end in 6 to 12 months from now.

And I see that some of the, you know, usual suspects within the software industry, they're responding to this straight out of the gate because we've received a price increase notification from Bloomberg already today in our inbox. You've seen that as well, right? So it's like they've already responded with a lot more confidence after Dario asked to slow down the train in the AI space over the weekend. But yeah, let's get back to it. But I don't think we're as fucked as you think.

Mikkel Rosenvold (1:28)

That's good, Andreas. We'll try and unpack as much as we can within the time space we have here. We're obviously unpacking everything in Real Vision, trying to cover all the angles, everything that's going wrong right now and what your opportunities are. This Wednesday, for instance, we're doing an Ask Me Anything. We're going to do a Q&A session with Andreas right after the FOMC meeting. That's at 3:30 p.m. Eastern. That's for Pro members only at Real Vision. If you want the live reaction to that, you can tune in to that. Otherwise, I suggest having a look at our State of the Union show that you did last week in Dres.

Really great run through of what our models are telling us right now. We'll touch upon some of it, but for the deep dive, you should check out our Pro content at Real Vision to get the full coverage and to keep you ahead of the curve.

So Andreas, where do you want to start? Dario inflation, oil, which disaster to look at first?

Andreas Steno (2:25)

Dario, I mean, when he's telling us that the internet will end in 6 to 12 months, potentially mankind's then...

Mikkel Rosenvold (2:33)

That is probably the big star, Andreas. Okay, so we had this tweet from a disgruntled ex-anthropic employee last week that really made the rounds, we have to admit, probably setting him up for a great substack channel or podcast or whatever you want to do, hedge fund maybe. And then it seemed like Dario Amodei, I don't know if he sort of jumped on this bandwagon, he called this or he felt that he needed to cover this issue ahead of an upcoming IPO.

We can try and guess at his motives here. In any case, he suggested slowing the pace, pacing the development of AI. He received backing from Sam Altman and Elon Musk, not from Donald Trump. We can get back to that, not at all. So how did you read this and is the market reaction fair in your opinion?

Andreas Steno (3:18)

I think the market reaction is pretty vanilla.

So by telling the market that at least he's in favor of slowing things down, he's obviously also trying to tell the market that the hardware trade will slow down. And some of those companies that have been on the receiving end of all of the AI beatings, if you don't want to mean all the software as a service names and all those names, they've recovered a little bit of ground today. So I mean, it is a straightforward market response to this. The question is whether the timeline and the risk scenario that he puts forward and he lays out, whether it's something to really worry about. And I did this simple study since 24 of all of the big quotes and big timelines by the AI bosses, right? Sam Oldman, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, et cetera. And I actually don't think any of those big promises with very tight deadlines and very tight timelines come into fruition. I mean, just take an example. In May 25, he said that we would have a white collar blood bath and half of entry-level jobs would be gone in 12 months. And unemployment could go to 10 to 20%. I think he said within one to three years, maybe one to four years, but at least we're now one and a half years into it and nothing is happening, right? That's point number one. He also stated in March 25 that AI would write 95% of all code within three to six months. We're getting there, but clearly later than what he said here. So sure. I mean, is there a risk that we could see rogue swarms hijacking the Internet within six to 12 months? I personally don't care a lot about that timeline given how he's guided us in other instances. In terms of his motives, a couple of things. I've seen a lot of theories floated on the Internet, and I personally just asked Claude to respond to his obvious AI slot. Because if you read his blog, it is very clearly written by AI, and everyone does that. So it's not like I'm trying to paint another story. But having said that, Mikkel, let me put it like this. So he's asking for a slower pace of the whole model build out for safety reasons. My first initial reaction was, okay, this is a hedge against the midterms. The Democrats have clearly been talking about this. So in light of that, I think it makes sense that both Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Dario Amodei of Anthrobic, they all hedge this risk in unison, since it could be a real risk that the Democrats would actually like to see something like this if they gain back power, right? Not that it necessarily matters a whole lot if they win the midterms, but it's probably a sign that we're getting there again, that the Democrats will, directionally speaking, get back in power.