Bubble Watch — Reading the AI Bubble in Its Own Filings
The AI-Economy
Fragility Scorecard
Not a price target. Not a date prediction. Follow one dollar through the circular-financing loop — click a leg, land on the SEC filing — then watch six independent indicators converge.
Michael Burry didn’t predict the 2008 crash by reading sentiment. He read the loan tapes — the actual collateral beneath the AAA story — and found the underlying assets didn’t support the narrative being told about them. This is the same method, applied to the AI economy: go beneath the narrative, measure the fundamentals, and watch for divergence. When enough independent indicators converge into the red simultaneously, that convergence is the signal. Not any one metric. The convergence.
Two tapes, running at once
The market tape says boom. The ground-truth tape says cuts. Both are live below — and the gap between them is what the rest of this analysis is about.
The narrative tape (the AI stack, bid up) is running ahead of the ground-truth tape (jobs cut, ~85% no ROI). Bubble Watch is the explanation of that gap. Follow one dollar through the loop →
Semiconductors +91% YTD. AI workforce: 123,653 cuts.
The market priced the boom; the workforce priced the cut. SOXX closed December 2025 at $313.69 and June 2026 at $599.73 — a +91% move in six months. Over the same period, AI and tech companies cut over 123,000 jobs, with AI cited as the reason rising from 7% in January to 40% in May. This is the top-level divergence signal: not a timing call, but a structural reading.
SOXX month-end closes via Yahoo Finance (ADC /api/history). +91% YTD: Dec ’25 close $313.69 → Jun ’26 $599.73. +146% trailing 12 months.
Layoffs: Challenger/Gray monthly reports; layoffs.fyi; Crunchbase. Jan–May 2026 total = 123,653.
Consistent with ADC AI Layoffs tracker.
Jun bar = month-to-date, faded. Fragility signal, not a timing call.
Full D(t) model →
Abstract and introduction — scope, method, and what the scorecard claims.