What if the most disruptive economic crisis of the decade is not triggered by a banking scandal, a housing bubble, or a geopolitical shock? We've clearly learnt from our mistakes a little too well, and looked ahead — So much so, that the crisis could now be artificial intelligence working exactly as promised.
It almost feels like a crossover between Black Mirror and Wall-E. Technology humming efficiently in the background, optimising everything, removing friction, cutting waste — until one day you look up and realise the humans are no longer central to the system they built. The machinery runs, the numbers look strong, and the people start drifting to the margins.
That same tension runs through The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis, a forward-looking macro memo by Citrini Research and Alap Shah. Written as if from June 30, 2028 but published on Feb 23, 2026, the memo imagines a world in which AI capabilities improve rapidly, corporate profits surge, productivity booms, and yet unemployment climbs above 10% while the S&P 500 falls nearly 40% from its peak.
The Intelligence Displacement Spiral
In the scenario, AI agents become capable of performing many white-collar tasks once considered secure. Coding, research, customer support, financial analysis, procurement and workflow management are increasingly handled by machines that work around the clock at a fraction of the cost of human employees.
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At first glance, this looks like an unambiguous win, right? Corporate margins expand, earnings beat expectations, and productivity surges. As a result, nominal GDP continues to print respectable growth, and on paper, the economy looks healthy.
But beneath those headline numbers, something begins to break internally. Companies lay off white-collar workers and redirect the savings into more AI tools. Those tools improve, enabling further job cuts, and parallely, displaced workers spend less, which weakens demand. If no one spends and demand weakens, the firms facing softer demand cut costs again and invest further in automation.
The memo calls this dynamic a "negative feedback loop with no natural brake".
The Rise of The 'Ghost GDP'
One of the more eye-catching ideas in the memo is the concept of the 'Ghost GDP'. Due to the on-paper 'functioning' of industries, output still shows up in national accounts, and the productivity metrics look impressive. But the income generated by that productivity increasingly flows to the owners of compute and capital, not to the households.
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The U.S. economy is heavily consumer-driven, with consumption making up roughly 70 percent of GDP. In Citrini's scenario, AI systems generate output without generating wages. Machines do not shop, take vacations, renovate kitchens, or finance cars. At least, not yet.
As white-collar professionals lose jobs or accept sharply lower pay in service roles, their discretionary spending falls. The top 10 to 20 percent of earners, who account for a disproportionate share of consumption, pull back.
From Sector Risk to Systemic Risk
At first, markets will obviously treat the disruption as sector-specific, as we are currently seeing with the sell-off in IT stocks. Software companies suffer as AI coding tools allow enterprises to build in-house alternatives. As a result, pricing power erodes because of workforce reductions at the clients' end.
The memo highlights how private credit had grown rapidly in the 2010s and 2020s, with large amounts of debt tied to software and technology companies. When AI-driven disruption challenges the assumption that annual recurring revenue will remain stable, leveraged buyouts of SaaS firms come under stress. When that happens, defaults will rise, and ratings will be downgraded.
The Mortgage Question
The US residential mortgage market is roughly $13 trillion, built on the assumption that borrowers will remain employed at similar income levels for decades.
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In 2008, mortgages were often weak at origination, causing the economic crisis of the time. In this imagined 2028, they were sound when issued. Borrowers had high credit scores, stable jobs and documented income, and the world, as we know it, changed after the loans were written.
As high-income professionals face job loss or sustained pay cuts, early signs of stress appear in prime ZIP codes. Delinquencies rise first in tech-heavy cities. Falling home prices compound the strain, because the marginal buyer is facing the same income uncertainty. The memo does not declare an outright housing collapse, but it frames the risk as a trajectory problem.
A Government Built for a Different World
The crisis outlined in the memo also challenges the fiscal architecture of the nations we live in. Federal revenue in the United States is heavily dependent on income and payroll taxes. If labor's share of GDP falls sharply while productivity gains accrue to capital, tax receipts will decline even as social spending needs rise.
The memo argues that institutions move at the pace of ideology, while AI capability moves at the pace of exponential improvement. Policymakers debate proposals such as direct transfers to displaced workers or taxes on AI compute, but political divisions slow response time, and that mismatch then becomes the true villain.
The memo's central message is that the economic system, from private credit to mortgages to tax policy, was optimised for a world in which human intelligence was scarce and valuable. If intelligence becomes abundant and cheap, the repricing could be painful. The question remains whether institutions can adapt before the feedback loop accelerates beyond their control.
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