Skip to navigationSkip to main contentSkip to right columnADVERTISEMENTOmor Ibne EhsanWed, August 5, 2026 at 6:18 PM GMT+2 5 min readQuick ReadPaulson warns NVDA-fueled AI capex mirrors 2008's circular risk: chip vendors fund AI labs that buy their chips, concentrating risk inside the loop.AI will quickly hollow out white-collar roles in legal, coding, and analysis even as headline unemployment at 4.2% masks the damage.Don't wait: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just revealed his top 10 AI stocks. See the full list FREE now.The man who ran Treasury during the last real financial crisis went on CNBC Tuesday from the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, sitting alongside Tim Geithner, and refused to pick a side. Hank Paulson steered a middle course between Bezos-style AI utopianism and Amodei-style civilizational alarm. He looked at the AI capex boom and saw a pattern from 2008, echoing its shape rather than its crash.24/7 Wall St.That shape is money moving in a circle. For a retail investor watching NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)-fueled index gains alongside a job market where JOLTS openings just fell to 7.36 million from 7.585 million in April, the Paulson framing matters.The Circular Money Loop Paulson Is WatchingHere is the setup in his own words. "The suppliers of chips and compute, you know, making investments in the customers. So they've got the capacity to buy and customers that need the chips, making investments in some of the suppliers to make sure they've got them." He was careful to say nothing nefarious is happening. Everyone acts rationally inside their own contract.The problem is what happens when the same dollar shows up on three different balance sheets. A chip vendor invests in an AI lab. The AI lab uses that money to buy chips from the vendor. The vendor books revenue, its stock rises, and it recycles the gain into the next round of customer financing. When demand is real, this looks like a flywheel. When demand softens, the same wiring runs in reverse, because the supplier's revenue, the customer's spending power, and the equity valuation propping up the arrangement are the same dollar wearing three hats.Don't wait: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just revealed his top 10 AI stocks. See the full list FREE now.Think of climbers roped together on a cliff. Fine on the way up. When one slips, everyone learns how tightly they were tied. Paulson's point is that risk is concentrated inside the loop, which is why he says a correction is inevitable even if he is not calling a date.The White Collar Jobs ShockThen he turned to labor. "In terms of white collar workers, okay, there's going to be a lot of a lot of displacement and it's going to happen so quickly." That word, quickly, is the load-bearing one.Terms and Privacy PolicyEU DSA contactPrivacy & Cookie SettingsMore Info