Jordi Visser
Macro investor with three decades on Wall Street, formerly president and chief investment officer of Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisers; now runs Visser Labs, advisi...
“…If you listen to economists, you are going to lose money.”
The Pomp Podcast · September 2026
Visser drops this near the end of a long answer on why rising rates will not damage the AI trade the way they once damaged a housing-and-autos economy. He frames it as something he has said repeatedly, and immediately explains what he means: the error is extrapolating past cycles into a period where demand and margins do not behave the way the models assume.
Transcript
…wave, a big, the most powerful wave in crypto. For that to happen and the reasons behind it, we need this kind of doubt when it starts to go up because the energy that should be associated should be real. For this to be a third wave, I also need the silent IPO thing to be there. I needed to see.
…roll. Everyone has one big question. Are interest rates going to go up or are they not? Scott Bessant this week gave an interview and he said, I have more information than the market has, obviously. How are you analyzing whether rates will go up or not? And then what is the impact of them changing?
…that a 200 basis point rise in 10 year yields doesn't change the margins for Anthropic or OpenAI by very much. It's about from, let's say, 70% to 69%, 200 basis points. This is the first time that this has gone on. So part of this fear over rates is the history of an economy that was driven by housing and was driven by autos and the great financial crisis. So again, I've said this repeatedly. If you listen to economists, you are going to lose money. If you listen to people who take the past and extrapolate it into a time with exponential demand where margins are infinite, I mean, they're as high as they can be. And the demand side is never ending because we barely have started. And the advancements in Grockbot mean more usage. Astra, which hasn't been released to us yet, but you read through X, like everything is going to continue. And I'll…
All right. So let's say that you are right, which I do, I do believe that you are correct in that if rates go up 200 basis points, you're not going to see a significant change in the profit margins of the large AI companies. Great. The AI companies maybe employ tens of thousands of people. Maybe we…
So when I say the only thing that matters, again, I'm saying you're not going to take nominal GDP to go down far if rates go from four and three quarters to five and a quarter. Now, again, the administration doesn't want that to happen. Do I think investors could freak out? Sure. And I think we've…
So just to make sure that maybe let me repeat this back. What you're saying is if rates go up 150, 200 basis points, asset prices could fall. Other parts of the economy could slow down or feel pain. But the main driver of GDP growth right now is the AI companies. And if the AI companies are…
More from The Pomp Podcast
