Welcome to The WC — your weekly shot of awesome.
Today, we’ve got:
- The weirdest AI thing I’ve seen
- Altea, All Access, and Auerbach
- US Debt
- Global debt
- When only the best will do
Don’t forget to pick up your all-access pass to see the stuff our sponsors won’t let me say.
Let’s go.
Table of Contents
The weirdest AI thing I’ve seen
Romance is hard these days.
But if you’re a Russian hacker coder looking for love, help is only a ChatGPT prompt away.
One guy used AI to manage the entire process, and it’s crazy, involves a huge amount of work, and sounds sort of exploitative.
The original if you want to practice your Russian:
Сделал предложение девушке, с которой ChatGPT общался за меня год. Для этого нейросеть переобщалась с другими 5239 девушками, которых отсеила как ненужных и оставила только одну. Поделюсь, как сделал такую систему, какие были проблемы и что вышло с остальными девушками. Тред pic.twitter.com/fbVO7OmZhF
— Aleksandr Zhadan (@biblikz) January 30, 2024
There’s an obvious sort of Cyrano De Bergerac solution here where Tinder rolls out an AI assistant to suggest better matches and help you elevate your banter game, so this is more than a creepy solution for inept hackers.
It’s also (I think?) better than AI girlfriends.
Build it before someone else does:
Altea, All Access, and Auerbach
Speaking of fantastic investment opportunities, I want to make sure you know about a few great things Alts has come out with recently and the sort of philosophy behind them.
Alts Mission
We want to help you make better alternative investment decisions no matter who you are or where you’re from. And we want to do it in a way that’s not beholden to a sponsor or anything else that would bias our content.
All Access Pass: For everyone, including our non-accredited members
We recently launched the All-Access Pass, which makes all our content available (including the fourth and fifth items in this note) to everyone. I hope you find this useful, entertaining, and informative as it helps you along your investment journey.
Altea: For our accredited members
Altea is a supportive community for accredited investors that enriches their lives through access to better alternate investment opportunities, a robust network of compelling individuals, and once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
We formally launched it Monday, and applications are open through Friday.
Auerbach: For our serious accredited investors:
Every so often, we come across a fantastic investment opportunity that I think our members will love. In this case, it’s an opportunity to acquire three stunning works by Frank Auerbach before he passes away. The best part? We can buy them for well below market rates.
If you’re accredited and want to learn more, let me know.
US Debt
It’s time for our quarterly check-in on the American consumer, which is like Christmas morning for me. These reports tell you everything you need to know about how the economy is actually doing.
The headline QoQ stats:
- Mortgage balances were up $112 billion to $12.25 trillion (1%)
- Credit card balances were up $50 billion to $1.13 trillion (4.6%)
- Auto loans rose $12 billion to $1.61 trillion (0.6%)
On the face of it, mortgage and auto numbers are pretty ok and what you’d expect in line with inflation.
The increase in credit card balances, which rose 4.6%, is scary as hell. (Though not everyone is worried)
This is the bit that terrifies me:
Serious delinquencies are headed straight up and to the right for credit cards, and auto loans are headed in the same direction.
And the younger you are, the worse your situation is.
The chart for auto loan delinquency looks the same, more or less.
The average monthly payment on new car loans for low-income Americans is now $564, up nearly 30% from pre-COVID pic.twitter.com/Hp8UIuvTUR
— Joey Politano 🏳️🌈 (@JosephPolitano) February 6, 2024
This silent economic crisis has never been about averages. It’s about a few specific demographics getting smash-hammered while their misery goes mostly under the radar.
I don’t know when the butcher’s bill will come due on this, and I’m not sure exactly how it’s going to play out (especially in an election year). It will be slowly, then all at once, and it’s going to be America’s young people who pay the heaviest price.
Global debt
Speaking of terrifying debt numbers, check out what’s going on with total global debt over the last ten years.