The cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street got jumpy after a viral Substack post from James van Geelen’s Citrini Research started ricocheting through trading screens.
For those not in the know, Citrini Research has been publishing macro and thematic stock research since 2023, building a following through early coverage of artificial intelligence and weight-loss drugs.
Citriniauthor James van Geelen and co-author tech entrepreneur Alap Shah framed Sunday’s post as a fictional macro memo from June 2028, pitching “a scenario that’s been relatively underexplored,” and insisting it was not a prediction.
That did not stop investors from punting first and reading later, with DoorDash, Visa, Mastercard, ServiceNow and Blackstone all name-checked and sold off hard on Monday.
Citrini’s imagined future starts with AI coding tools getting so good that most software is spat out by machines, turning months of engineering into hours of churn.
In that world, software vendors who used to hike renewal prices with a straight face now find customers threatening to build their own tools and demanding discounts. It paints a grim picture of a clone economy where rivals with brand recognition can quickly spin up copycat products, flattening differentiation and torching pricing power.
A hit to public software earnings then bleeds into private markets, where private equity has loved leveraged buyouts built on steady recurring revenue.
Citrini claims some large private software firms will begin defaulting on loans by 2027, once the maths stops working and lenders realise optimism is not collateral.
The post then swings at intermediaries, arguing AI agents that can log in, click around and act autonomously could gut fee-based businesses.
Payment processors such as Visa and Mastercard get singled out because their cut for connecting banks looks vulnerable if AI can do something similar cheaply.
Citrini leans into consumer chaos, imagining agents trained to shop on your behalf and hammer merchants into price wars.
Van Geelen and Shah wrote: “Humans don’t really have the time to price-match across five competing platforms before buying a box of protein bars. Machines do.”
The last act is a white-collar doom loop: price pressure drives layoffs, companies reinvest in AI, and improved automation kills even more jobs. The post argues that blue-collar and gig work take less of a hit at first, but as displaced office workers pile in, labour supply spikes and wages slide.
