Where are all the IPOs? The great private equity ruse

Consider that both of the following claims appear to be simultaneously true:
*Stock markets are expensive and therefore ought to be receptive to IPOs, and yet there are relatively few.
*Private equity funds (including venture capital) are struggling to achieve "exits" and return meaningful capital to their increasingly-impatient investors - to such a degree they are resorting to shuffling assets into "continuation funds" and taking on margin loans to fund distributions.

Artificial Intelligence or Authentic Stupidity?

Over the past three years, the AI/LLM boom and its associated capex supercycle has been having a profound effect on the economy, financial markets, and society (though not on corporate productivity, as we’ll discuss). However, as unrestrained AI optimism and its financial market manifestations have continued to mushroom, evidence has been quietly mounting that many of the boom’s foundational assumptions are starting to buckle. The divergence between the two has become so stark that there is a strong case to be made that the boom has now morphed into a fully-fledged bubble, and of a size that makes the dot.com bubble look positively quaint.