So, the Masters of the Universe Need a Nap?
Let me get this straight. The entire, planet-spanning, multi-trillion-dollar edifice of global capitalism grinds to a halt because a few thousand people on an island in New York want to gorge themselves on tryptophan and argue with their relatives? And you want me to take this system seriously? Because it seems the people running it don’t. The stock market, this supposed engine of innovation and prosperity, apparently runs on the same schedule as a high schooler on holiday break. It’s utterly magnificent in its absurdity. All the complex charts, the frantic screaming on the trading floor, the breathless analysis on cable news—it all pauses for a big, roasted bird. A bird! It’s a beautiful, self-inflicted wound that reveals the whole thing for the theatrical performance it truly is. They aren’t titans of industry. They’re toddlers who need a juice box and a nap before they can go back to playing with everyone else’s money.
But wait, it gets better. Why this half-day on Black Friday?
And then, after this sacred pause for gluttony, they don’t even have the decency to commit to the bit. They come back. But not really. They stumble in on Friday for a pathetic “early close” at 1 p.m. What is that? It’s the financial equivalent of showing up to your job hungover, making a single phone call, and then slinking out the back door before the boss notices. Who is even trading during this farce? It’s a skeleton crew of people who lost a bet, manned by the very algorithms that are supposedly causing all this “AI fear.” It’s a low-volume, high-volatility ghost ship adrift on a sea of half-priced televisions and consumer debt. This isn’t a market; it’s a parody of a market, a ritual performed out of habit by a system that has forgotten its own purpose. They might as well replace the opening bell with a starting pistol for a shopping mall stampede. Same energy.
Wall Street Braces for ‘AI Fears’? Are the Robots Finally Demanding a Paycheck?
So what are they actually afraid of? A hostile takeover by Siri?
But let’s talk about the real boogeyman in the room, the new monster under the mahogany bed: ‘AI fears.’ You see headlines like ‘Wall Street braces…’ as if they’re preparing for an alien invasion. What are they bracing for? Are they afraid the AI is going to realize that ‘synergistic growth’ is a meaningless buzzword? Or that ‘quantitative easing’ is just a fancy term for hitting the ‘print money’ button until the ink runs out? Because the fear isn’t that AI will fail. The deep, existential terror coursing through the veins of every hedge fund manager is that the AI will succeed. That it will do their job, but without the ego, the eight-figure bonus, or the crippling addiction to cocaine.
For decades, they built these things. They crafted elegant, lightning-fast algorithms to front-run trades, to scalp fractions of a penny a billion times a day, creating a high-frequency casino that has nothing to do with actual value creation. They built the beast to serve them. And now they’re clutching their pearls because the beast is looking back at them and blinking. The AI isn’t going to launch nuclear missiles. It’s going to look at their ‘proprietary trading strategies,’ their Fibonacci retracements, their ‘head and shoulders’ patterns, and correctly identify it as what it is: financial astrology. It’s the panic of a high priest whose congregation is about to discover that the rain dance doesn’t actually work. The fear isn’t of a machine that’s too dumb; it’s of a machine that’s too smart to keep playing their stupid game.
This isn’t a new panic. It’s the same old story with a shiny new acronym.
And let’s not pretend this is some new phenomenon. Wall Street has a panic attack every few years over some new technology it doesn’t understand. Remember the dot-com bubble? Everyone threw billions at any company with a ‘.com’ in its name, convinced that selling pet food online was the key to infinite riches. Then it all imploded. Remember the crypto craze? Digital tulips for a new generation, promising to decentralize finance while centralizing wealth in the hands of a few awkward nerds. That’s a slow-motion car crash we’re still watching. AI is just the latest mania. It’s a powerful tool, no doubt. But in the hands of Wall Street, it’s just a faster way to make the same old mistakes. They aren’t afraid of AI destroying the world. They’re afraid of it exposing them as the obsolete, overpaid middlemen they are. The AI is the kid in the fable pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, and the emperor is terrified.
And This ‘Typical’ Post-Thanksgiving Performance… Is That Based on Science or Superstition?
So, we’re trusting financial horoscopes now?
Because after we get through the holiday farce and the AI panic, we’re treated to another wonderful piece of financial folklore: the analysis of ‘typical’ post-Thanksgiving market performance. Pundits will appear on TV with very serious faces, pointing to charts and graphs about the ‘Santa Claus Rally’ or the ‘December effect.’ This is voodoo economics. It’s the desperate search for patterns in pure, unadulterated chaos. Saying the market ‘typically’ goes up after Thanksgiving is like saying a flipped coin ‘typically’ lands on heads after you’ve had a big meal. It’s meaningless correlation dressed up as causation to give you the warm, fuzzy feeling that someone, somewhere, has a clue what’s going on.
Nobody has a clue. They didn’t see the 2008 crash coming. They didn’t see the pandemic crash coming. They sure as hell don’t know what’s going to happen next Monday. The performance of the market has nothing to do with turkey or tinsel. It has to do with Federal Reserve policy, geopolitical instability, and the collective, bipolar mood swings of millions of people who have been convinced that owning a tiny fraction of a company they’ve never visited is the path to security. The whole system is a confidence game. And when the confidence wavers, whether because of a new virus or a new algorithm, the whole house of cards starts to wobble. So please, spare me the historical data on holiday rallies. It’s just a comforting bedtime story they tell themselves before the nightmares begin again.
But maybe that’s the point. The market is just a reflection of us. It’s irrational, prone to panic, and easily distracted by shiny objects and holiday meals. And now, we’ve created an intelligence that is none of those things. An AI doesn’t get sleepy after a big meal. It doesn’t get scared. It doesn’t get greedy. It just calculates. And perhaps the ultimate fear on Wall Street is that one day, the AI will finish its calculations, look at the whole chaotic, nonsensical, turkey-fueled system we’ve built, and simply decide to unplug it. Now that would be a market correction for the ages.
