Citrini Research, a hedge fund American published this week a text written as if it were a macroeconomic memorandum from June 2028. It is not a prediction, its authors warn. It is a speculative exercise. A feasible scenario. It has achieved 24 million impressions, and counting. It is not an anecdotal tweet.
The markets they have responded by sinking. Visa has fallen 4.4%. Mastercard, 6.3%. American Express, almost 8%. And Capital One, 8%.
This deserves an explanation. And it’s not what it seems.
Between the lines. The market reaction is not explained by the specific content of the Citrini Research report, which includes arguments as debatable as that AI agents will abandon cards to pay with stablecoins in Solana. Antonio Ortiz, technology analysts, has pointed it out precisely: part of the argument “it is from the first of Twitter AI-hype“. The idea that an agent will compare twenty food delivery apps vibecodeadas to find the cheapest one smells like a caricature of the future.
But the panic is not irrational. It is precisely the panic of not knowing where the limit is.
Why is it importantand. What has moved the market has not been so much the thesis about payments but the thesis about the destruction of value. And that is solid: many billions of dollars of market capitalization have been built on a single foundation: that humans are slow, impatient, forgetful and loyal out of inertia. That we do not compare prices. That we renew subscriptions that we do not use. And that we pay commissions that we do not negotiate.
An AI agent has none of those weaknesses. And that changes everything.
The backdrop. Citrini’s report comes at a time when the so-called “saaspocalypse“is no longer a metaphor. WSJ states that investors are terrified by the possibility that AI ends up doing the work that large software companies bill for today. ServiceNow, Salesforce, business management platforms… all built on the premise that companies need software for their employees to do their jobs. But… what happens when employees disappear? What if the software itself can be replicated in weeks with agentic coding tools?
Citrini’s fiction begins exactly there, in early 2026, when a competent developer can reproduce the core functionality of a mid-market SaaS in a few weeks, and constructs a scenario of systemic collapse.
The big question. The report’s most disturbing argument is that in every previous technological cycle, job destruction created new jobs that only humans could do. This time, AI is already occupying those new positions as well. If that’s true—if AI improves faster than workers can reorient themselves—the self-correcting mechanism that has always kept creative destruction from turning into outright destruction wouldn’t work.
That is the scenario that the markets have discounted this week, even if only partially and speculatively thanks to a creepypasta financial.
Yes, but. The scenario requires assuming a speed of adoption that is not guaranteed, a completely absent political response and a total absence of new economic sectors. None of the three conditions are set in stone. Furthermore, as Antonio points out, there is some collective hysteria in the reaction: each announcement or “scary story catches attention and moves investors.” Markets are trading in panic over the unknown.
But there’s an important difference between saying “this scenario won’t happen” and saying “this scenario is impossible.” And that difference is exactly what has the market nervous.
The alarm signal. The most striking thing this week is that a speculative text, written in economic science fiction format, has been enough to move billions in market capitalization.
That says a lot about the state of certainty in the markets regarding AI: it is practically non-existent. Nobody really knows how much a company whose moat It is human friction in a world where that friction is disappearing.
The canary is still alive. But investors have stopped trusting the canary.
Featured image | Avery Evans
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