‘Ghost GDP,’ a white-collar recession, and the death of friction: Substack’s top finance writer warns of the 2028 AI crisis nobody sees coming

Framed as a postmortem dispatch written from June 2028, Citrini’s memo describes a dystopian economy where aggressive AI adoption initially drives record corporate profits but—via mass layoffs—ultimately hollows out the American consumer base. There’s a simple problem at the heart of this picture. This is what Citrini calls “ghost GDP,” created by AI, inflating national accounts but never actually circulating through the real economy because of the inconvenient fact that “machines spend zero dollars on disc ...