Whistleblower warns a devastating bubble is about to pop Trump’s rotten economy

President Donald Trump has significantly boosted AI throughout his second term — and a whistleblower confirms that major economic bubble is about to burst, and take many Americans' fortunes with it.

“We've spent something like $1.4 trillion dollars building data centers in this country, and the revenues on AI are $600 billion,” said Alexis Goldstein, a former financial regulatory expert for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and Maryland Democratic congressional candidate to The Left Hook’s Wajahat Ali on Thursday. “So the tech industry has earned not even half of what they've spent building these data centers.”

Goldstein then compared the AI bubble to the housing bubble that led to the Great Recession.

“If you remember the 2008 financial crisis, the asset at the back of all that complicated financial engineering was a house, and the saying was, ‘Well, you'll always have the house, and so it will always have some value,’” Goldstein told Ali. “And that turned out not to be true, because there was just such an oversaturation and so much predatory lending — not every house did end up having value.”

She added, “So what do you want to guess the asset is behind the financial engineering right now, building out these data centers? I'll give you a hint: it's not a house. What is it? It's the graphics card that they fill up these data centers with to run all of these large language models — the Nvidia graphics card that they're using to do all of this ChatGPT generation, predicting something that sounds kind of like something you might say in the future, or helping you produce a piece of artwork like a Pikachu blowing bubbles at the Apple logo, or whatever it is that you use ChatGPT for. It's these graphics cards that get obsolete really fast. They're taking an accounting tax break over six years, but these graphics cards last two to three years max, and then they either burn out or they become obsolete.”

Because AI technology is so unsustainable, Goldstein argued that AI tech moguls like Mark Zuckerberg are engaged in billions of borrowing in order to keep building their investment. Despite their massive investment, however, few people are paying for AI, and when they do — such as the military-industrial complex that bombed an Iranian school — they tend to find it less effective than promised.

“Nobody is paying for this except the military, and when the military is paying for it, it is creating lethal, horrible consequences,” Goldstein said. “There is a lot of reporting on this in the financial press, though less of it has made its way to the mainstream press. But I think we're seeing that the public sort of gets it. The data centers raise utility bills. They often pay very little in local taxes. They can lead to bad health outcomes. I visited one in Maryland's 6th district, in Adamstown, and it actually smells bad, in addition to everything else.”

She continued, “So the public is saying, ‘We don't want these.’ You see executives at graduation ceremonies talking about AI being the future, and they get booed by the students. The public, I think, is very informed about this. The people who aren't informed — and unfortunately this is common — is Congress. It's sort of like in 2008, when the people on the ground were saying, ‘Well, this is kind of crazy. This mortgage thing seems to be going out of control. My friends seem to be getting really predatory mortgage loans, or cash-out on their houses, especially in communities of color — this seems really messed up.’ And Congress, of course, was the last to know, and then the crisis happened and there was so much money lost in the economy.

So I'm really afraid that this is all that over again.”

Speaking to this author for Democracy at Work in 2025, linguist Emily Bender discussed a book she co-authored with sociologist Alex Hanna called “The AI Con.” In it, she explained that AI does not do all of the things that the corporations that promote it say it can do.

“We call the book ‘The AI Con’ because there's a con happening here and it's happening at many levels,” Bender explained. “At the base, you have what's effectively a parlor trick, the systems that everyone's excited about. Right now, the large language models or chatbots are systems designed to do exactly one thing, which is to output plausible looking text. They mimic the way we use language.”

In a December article, The Conversation pointed out that philosopher Karl Marx actually broke down the same dynamics that are at play with the AI boom.

“Marx argued that an economy becomes unstable when the mass of accumulated capital can no longer be profitably reinvested,” The Conversation observed. “An overproduction of capital, he explained, occurs whenever additional investment fails to generate new surplus value. When surplus capital cannot profitably be absorbed through the production of goods, it is displaced into speculative outlets.”

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