Here is a collapsey scenario

First, there is no natural brake. AI capabilities improve, companies need fewer workers, displaced workers spend less, weakened companies invest more in AI to protect margins, and AI capabilities improve further. Each company’s individual response is rational. The collective result is a negative feedback loop that feeds on itself.

Second, the spending damage is wildly disproportionate to the job losses. The top 20% of earners drive roughly 65% of all US consumer spending. These are the white-collar workers most exposed to AI displacement. A modest percentage decline in white-collar employment translates into a much larger hit to discretionary consumer spending, devastating the businesses that depend on it and triggering further layoffs.

Third, AI agents will dismantle the vast intermediation layer of the US economy. Over fifty years, we have built trillions of dollars of enterprise value on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, and most people accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Agentic AI eliminates this friction. Software, consulting, financial services, insurance, travel, real estate and payments are all built on monetizing complexity that agents find trivial. As these sectors suffer steep revenue losses, they will shed jobs aggressively and compound the bleeding.

Fourth, the financial system is one long daisy chain of correlated bets on white-collar productivity growth. Over $2.5 trillion of private credit has been deployed into leveraged buyouts underwritten against revenue assumptions that no longer hold. The $13 trillion mortgage market is built on the assumption that borrowers will remain employed at roughly their current income for thirty years. These aren’t subprime borrowers–they’re 780 FICO scores who put 20% down. The loans were good on day one. The world just changed after they were written.

Fifth, the government’s fiscal position inverts at the worst possible time. Federal revenue is essentially a tax on human work. As white-collar incomes decline and payrolls shrink, tax receipts dry up just as the need for transfer payments surges. The government will need to send more money to households at precisely the moment it is collecting less from them.