Rising bond yields and a narrowing stock rally have revived fears of an AI bubble, with many investors comparing today’s market to the dot-com era.
Yet, Jordi Visser, a macro investor and former Morgan Stanley executive, indicates the comparison misses where the real damage is building: inside the banking system.
In his latest YouTube video, Visser said AI agents could do to banks and payment networks what AI coding tools did to software companies.
He called it the “bankpocalypse.”
High Yields Are Problematic When They Reach 7%: Visser
Yields are not yet high relative to the economy, Visser said, with nominal gross domestic product — growth before adjusting for inflation — running near 6.5%. He would only see a long-term problem if yields climbed well above 7%.
In addition, Visser said the stock market is built differently than it was in 2008 when big tech companies made up just over 10% of the S&P 500 during the financial crisis. Today, he puts the figure at about 56%.
These companies depend far less on borrowing, so higher rates hurt them less.
His revenue comparison makes the point: In 2015, Ford Motor Co. (NYSE:F), General Motors Co. (NYSE:GM) and the four largest homebuilders generated $333 billion in sales. Today, that figure is $432 billion, or about 2.4% growth.
Meanwhile, Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Micron Technology Inc. (NASDAQ:MU) went from $21 billion in combined revenue to $535 billion over the same period, he said.
Visser reads weak market breadth as rotation, not a warning of collapse.
“It is insane to me that people are sitting there saying that this is going to be like the dot-com bubble,” Visser said.
The Bankpocalypse Thesis
Visser said the KBW Nasdaq Bank Index — as closely tracked by the SPDR S&P Bank ETF (NYSE:KBE) — which tracks large U.S. lenders, closed below its 200-day moving average, a widely watched long-term trend line.
He expects banking disruption to become a central market story in the first quarter of next year.
Banks “are going to have a bank apocalypse just like SaaS did,” Visser said.
He was clear that this does not mean banks going bankrupt. Instead, he expects a slow squeeze on valuations, as happened with software stocks that kept earning money but lost their premium multiples.
The driver is AI agents, which are software assistants that act on a person’s behalf.
According to Visser, agents need instant settlement.
Every day money sits in transit creates risk. “Speed is also a safety feature,” Visser said.
For example, he highlighted the 2021 GameStop frenzy, after which U.S. regulators shortened stock settlement to one business day.
For this reason, Visser sees “zero chance” that Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) and Mastercard Inc. (NYSE:MA) win in the long run, although both could still benefit over the next two years.
He compared them to BlackBerry in the early iPhone era.
He also cited Joseph Chalom, chief executive of SharpLink and a former BlackRock executive, who estimates agents will handle about $4 trillion in fees for the financial industry over the next decade.
Chalom sees Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) as the trusted rail for that activity.
The thesis rests on one variable. Agents must earn enough user trust to move real money. How fast that happens will decide whether banks face a slow squeeze or a sharp repricing.
Image: Shutterstock
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