Ai doomsday memo fuels ai market jitters and warns of 'ghost GDP'
A speculative memo from Citrini Research, framed as a postmortem from June 2028, stirred fresh ai anxiety on Wall Street and coincided with a sharp market wobble Monday. Investors and strategists are parsing a scenario that links a sudden jump in agent capability to mass layoffs, defaults and a collapsed consumer base.
Citrini Research’s Ai post and its author, James Van Geelen
The document originates with Citrini Research, described in the memo as a little-known US firm that provides analysis of "transformative 'megatrends'. " The firm’s founder, James Van Geelen, is identified as the top finance writer on Substack and the author of a viral "thought exercise" framed as a "scenario, not a prediction. " The memo is presented as a postmortem dispatch written from June 2028, with its visible publication date (Feb. 22, 2026) struck through and replaced with June 30, 2028.
Van Geelen is described as a former Los Angeles paramedic with degrees in biology and psychology who built a reputation on "second-order thinking. " He told Demetri Kofinas of the Hidden Forces podcast in April 2025 that a "sword of Damocles" hung over the white-collar employee. Van Geelen has also claimed his real-world investment portfolio surged more than 200% since May 2023. The memo frames the broader danger as a "global intelligence crisis. "
How markets moved: S&P, Nasdaq, Dow and named stocks
Market action followed quickly. The S&P dropped more than 1% on Monday, and the S&P 500, Nasdaq Composite and Dow Jones Industrial Average all fell sharply that day as investors contemplated the memo. The software component of the S&P slid to its lowest level since a president’s "liberation day" tariff announcement in April, and some traders attributed part of the wobble to the president’s latest tariffs.
Shares in several companies specifically named in the scenario were hit: Uber, DoorDash, Mastercard and American Express lost between 4% and 6% in the same period, and those stocks are said to have fallen this week on the back of the memo.
From a capability "jump" to industry upheaval: agents, code tools and targets
The Citrini scenario opens with ai agents undergoing a "jump in capability, " a step the memo says "has already happened, " citing Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex as examples that have wowed users in recent months. In the scenario, those agents undercut software-as-a-service companies such as Monday. com, Zapier and Asana by performing in-house tasks like managing databases and organising workflows at lower cost, pushing businesses that rely on long-term contracts—Oracle is named—into "a race to the bottom" on pricing.
The memo imagines every consumer using a personal agent to transact, sidelining firms that monetise what Citrini calls "friction"—for example, travel and estate agencies that act as middlemen for booking holidays or buying property. It sketches developers and civilians coding their own food-delivery apps, fragmenting markets and destroying legacy margins, with business for Uber and other ride-sharing apps evaporating. The memo also describes agents choosing cryptocurrency over Visa and Mastercard because transaction costs are cheaper, gutting traditional payment providers. Citrini writes that "habitual app loyalty, the entire basis of the business model, simply didn’t exist for a machine. "
Ghost GDP, white-collar unemployment and a feedback loop with no brake
Citrini popularises the phrase "ghost GDP": AI-created output that inflates national accounts but never circulates through the real economy because "machines spend zero dollars on discretionary goods. " The memo forecasts aggressive AI adoption driving record corporate profits but, mass layoffs, hollowing out the American consumer base. In the scenario unemployment tops and crests over 10%, and white-collar unemployment is particularly severe among accountants, lawyers, marketers, software engineers and systems administrators.
As consumer spending drops, the memo describes companies cutting blue-collar wages while increasing spending on agents, creating a "negative feedback loop with no natural brake. " That loop, the scenario argues, leads many borrowers—even those who once had high-paying jobs and excellent credit scores—to default on loans; financial institutions tighten lending standards; consumer spending falls further; and the economy spirals into recession while the stock market crashes. The fictionalized scene has the S&P 500 plunging 38% from its high and an Occupy Silicon Valley movement setting up camp outside OpenAI and Anthropic's offices.
The memo closes with a reflection from its authors: "We are certain some of these scenarios won't materialized. We're equally certain that machine intelligence will continue to accelerate, " and it urges investors to reassess how much of their portfolios are built on assumptions "that won't survive the decade. "
Market reaction, skepticism and historical comparisons
Not all market commentators accepted the scenario at face value. Neil Wilson, an analyst at Saxo Capital Markets, called it "real doomsday porn stuff, which is always lapped up by readers and market commentators and the press, " adding, "I don't think it's necessarily going to play out as they see it, but it's a bit of a wake-up call that the economy already no longer resembles the one just a few years ago. " Michael O'Rourke, chief market strategist at Jonestrading, said he was surprised by the reaction: "I have seen this market exhibit incredible resilience in the face of actual negative news. Now, a literal work of fiction sends it into a tailspin. "
Other context in the memo links the forecast to past technology-driven disruption: the internet boom of the 1990s displaced workers in physical retail, music distribution, print media, video rentals and travel agencies, but businesses adapted and new industries such as e-commerce emerged. The Citrini scenario is explicitly framed as speculative and thought-provoking, yet it has prompted investors to weigh how quickly ai-driven change could affect jobs, credit and markets.
