Here is a fascinating report that was just released illustrating the carnage from AI in global equity markets.
SPECIAL REPORT: AI Fears Grip Equity Markets
February 18 (King World News) – Gerald Celente: PUBLISHER’S NOTE: As we had forecast last year at this time, prepare for a Dot-com Bust 2.0.
But as they do, the main street media Presstitutes who put out for their corporate pimps and government whore masters ignored our forecast. Why? Because they are only interested in making money and selling the bullshit they are paid to sell.
Now that reality has hit The Street. And not only is the Dot-com Bust 2.0busting because of what we had forecast, the latest worry is that AI will put a bust on a lot of big businesses that will be going out of business.
Indeed, in a Financial Times article today, the headline warns: “Shareholders resist the urge to ‘buy the dip’ as the final outcome of AI disruption remains unclear.”
The “un-clarity” they are worried about is just how powerful AI will become and how many companies it will take down.
Here are some of the latest warnings:
SECTOR VALUES DROP AS AI NEWS SPOOKS U.S. INVESTORS
On 9 February, insurance company stock prices fell after OpenAI debuted an artificial intelligence (AI) app that could provide homeowners insurance quotes. The next day, news of an AI capable of advising on tax strategies sank shares of asset managers and brokerage firms.
Also last week, Anthropic released an update of its Claude AI that it says can do legal research and conduct some specialized financial and management tasks. That sank software stocks in general, with PayPal, Salesforce, and Thomson Reuters all sliding downhill.
Tech stocks also continue to take a drubbing at the hands of AI. Last week, Amazon posted its eighth consecutive losing day in the market after announcing a massive increase in its capital budget for its AI data center buildout. Apple’s market value slipped 5 percent.
“It’s shoot first, ask questions later,” David Wagner, in charge of equity trading at Aptus Capital Advisors, told The Wall Street Journal. “One part of the market is a funding mechanism for another, then the next day it switches,” he said of investors’ panic and confusion over AI’s possible impacts across the economy.
Market players are taking refuge – perhaps temporary, perhaps longer term – in stocks of companies that will endure regardless of AI’s ups and downs, including consumer staples and energy.
“I’m trying to figure out what story to make of [the volatility],” chief strategist Patrick Ryan at Madison Investments told the WSJ. “There are a lot of days like that.”
COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE STOCKS ARE AI’S LATEST VICTIM
Investors ditched commercial real estate stocks last week as they fled “high-fee, labor-intensive business models viewed as potentially vulnerable to AI-driven disruption,” analyst Jade Rahmani at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods wrote in a note last week.
Fears that artificial intelligence (AI) would sink current business models of financial firms already have roiled the value of those shares. Software stocks took a beating recently after AI developer Anthropic released an AI that enables businesses to do legal work and create programs for which, until now, they had to pay license fees to software companies.
Real estate is now taking its turn in the barrel.
CBRE, a major real estate services firm, saw its stock price tumble 12.8 percent on 12 February. The only times the price has fallen more in a day were during the COVID War and the depths of the Great Recession, data firm Oppenheimer noted.
Cushman & Wakefield, another iconic firm in the industry, watched its market capitalization shrink 14 percent.
Jones Lang LaSalle, one of the largest brokers, fell 11.1 percent. Hudson Pacific Properties and SL Green Realty each went down 8 percent, and Newmark was off more than 5 percent. BXP, the largest U.S. developer of office properties, retreated 5.4 percent.
Markets were closed on Monday, 16 February, for the Presidents’ Day holiday.
“Investors are weighing whether advances in AI could ultimately pressure parts of the business by automating tasks and streamlining deal processes,” Bloomberg noted.
Commercial real estate values have been on the skids since the COVID War, and the advent of remote and hybrid work models quashed demand for office space. “Investors worry that AI could sound a death knell for the sector,” CNBC said.
On the Dwarkesh Podcast earlier this month, Elon Musk opined that office towers will one day be obsolete because of AI.
“Corporations that are purely AI and robotics will vastly outperform any corporations that have people in the loop,” he said. “‘Computer[analysts/programmer] used to be a job that humans had. You would get a job as a computer analyst where you would do calculations. They would have skyscrapers full of humans just doing calculations.
“Now that entire skyscraper can be replaced by a laptop with a spreadsheet,” he noted.
Some analysts agreed with Rahmani that the selloff was an “AI scare trade” as investors stampeded away from financial service businesses, insurance companies, private credit funds, and software firms over a few days.
The rush to sell was “excessive, given limited news,” analyst Bredan Lynch at Barclays told clients. Fears that AI will destroy office real estate and erase jobs “are pertinent risks but that hasn’t changed” in the few days before the selloff began, he added.
That may be true in the short term but the long-range view is darker, some analysts believe.
In the near future, outcome-driven AI agents will conduct end-to-end workflows, replacing human-led processes, Thierry Wizman, a strategist at Macquarie bank, wrote in a note.
“For companies that are slow to adopt or have built customer models based on costly human-level discretion and interaction, that transition [by the industry to AI] could be fatal,” he warned.
INDIA’S TECH STOCKS LOSE $50 BILLION ON AI FEARS
India’s technology stock suffered their worst weekly performance since April 2025 last week, extending a selloff that erased about $50 billion from the sector’s value so far this month.
The country’s Nifty IT index dove 8.2 percent during the week of 9 February. The index dropped by as much as 5.2 percent on Friday before recovering to post a day-end loss of 1.44 percent.
Anthropic’s release of its updated Claude AI in January has sparked a global selloff not only in tech shares, but in the various industries that Claude could now disrupt traditional jobs and work processes. Those areas include finance, insurance, and software as well as the overall tech sphere.
If Claude speeds AI’s adoption across the country, it could severely disrupt India’s $283-billion information technology services industry, Reuters said. IT companies could fall short of their growth targets if AI causes the industry’s customers to invest in AI as a replacement for their current services, JPMorgan’s analysts warned.
The country’s tech industry has failed to adequately explain why and how the sector can turn AI into an opportunity rather than a threat, portfolio manager Sat Duhra at Henderson Far East Income, wrote in a note.
As in other countries, investors have panicked and sold off before giving AI’s impact a realistic assessment.
“Investors have largely over-reacted to the threat posed by these AI tools,” Duhra added. “It is important to note that IT companies remain relevant even in the age of AI, albeit with a leaner headcount.”
It is “overly simplistic” to think AI can suddenly generate software that will replace applications that have been refined over years and render IT service companies obsolete, JPMorgan analysts contended.
“IT services companies remain the plumbers in the tech world, and if enterprise software/SaaS is rewritten on a [customized] basis by [AI] agents, it will need significant services plumbing to work in enterprise context and minimize AI slop,” they pointed out.
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