Should there be a LIBOR for 1GB VRAM set each morning?
Considering that LIBOR was discontinued in 2023 after a scandal of manipulation and fraud, YES! It's back to the future.
Nvidia is the central bank of AI
121–130 of 363 posts
Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI
#122> worth around $5.4trn Note that the Fed has a $6.7tn balance sheet [1]. (This is a silly comparison. But still fun.) The real comparison: Nvidia's $500+ billion of investments and commitments [2] is substantially more than any easing the Fed has done in the same time [3]. Monetarily, Nvidia is creating a lot of money in our economy. The good news: I have seen no evidence Nvidia has borrowed against its stock or othe…
Its stock could crash without causing–as long as its cash flows continue–a credit crisis through its investments and commitments Uh, that’s a pretty load-bearing as long as its cash flows continue . The two things are surely correlated.
Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI
#123> worth around $5.4trn Note that the Fed has a $6.7tn balance sheet [1]. (This is a silly comparison. But still fun.) The real comparison: Nvidia's $500+ billion of investments and commitments [2] is substantially more than any easing the Fed has done in the same time [3]. Monetarily, Nvidia is creating a lot of money in our economy. The good news: I have seen no evidence Nvidia has borrowed against its stock or othe…
M2 is $21 trillion, which is what the fed signed up to backstop. How much did NVDA sign up to backstop?
> which is what the fed signed up to backstop
No, it's not. M2 includes things like traveler's cheques and money-market funds.
Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would also follow that by increasing the money supply significantly they’re also contributing to inflation a great deal correct? (Given the rest of the economy is not growing at near the same rate as the AI industry)
Maybe a dumb question but how is NVIDIA increasing the total supply of money? Only the fed can actually order more money to be "created". Private companies can only work within the existing supply, that is, their reserves, no?
All debt is money. Anybody can create money, the trick is getting other people to accept it.
Nvidia is vendor financing its output.
An ai company order $100m of GPUs. Nvidia delivers and holds onto that debt as an asset - like a bank loan.
The production company uses AI to create better plant and purchases $100m of AI tokens to do so. The ai company hold that debt like a bank loan
Nvidia requests $100m of production based on its $100m of orders. The production company holds that debt like a bank loan.
You now have a monetary loop. Take a single $10 bank deposit and Nvidia pays the production company, who pays the ai company who pays Nvidia. Run that round the circle a few million times and everybody has been paid.
Rinse and repeat.
Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Private banks increase money supply by lending. If 10 people deposit $1000 in a bank, it can loan $9000 to an 11th person. Now the economy has $19000 total.
The $9000 has to be paid back, and then some. I sure hope you aren't an accountant.
But at that point in time, there's 19k in money. And future repayments of that loan back to the bank are less valuable to it than that current value figure. Because a bank can do a lot more shenanigans with that loan figure than it can with just the deposits.
Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI
#126> worth around $5.4trn Note that the Fed has a $6.7tn balance sheet [1]. (This is a silly comparison. But still fun.) The real comparison: Nvidia's $500+ billion of investments and commitments [2] is substantially more than any easing the Fed has done in the same time [3]. Monetarily, Nvidia is creating a lot of money in our economy. The good news: I have seen no evidence Nvidia has borrowed against its stock or othe…
Its stock could crash without causing–as long as its cash flows continue–a credit crisis through its investments and commitments Uh, that’s a pretty load-bearing as long as its cash flows continue . The two things are surely correlated.
> that’s a pretty load-bearing as long as its cash flows continue. The two things are surely correlated
It's an important difference. In the GFC, the value of AAA-rated tranches fell. With the benefit of hindsight, we know they continued paying. They were directly leveraged, however, so mark-to-market losses caused firms to fail.
Nvidia stock crashing shouldn't have a similar effect to these commitments. If someone else has massively levered their Nvidia position, they'll obviously blow up. But Nvidia could survive a good deal of equity-market tumult in a way a bank could not.
Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI
#127> worth around $5.4trn Note that the Fed has a $6.7tn balance sheet [1]. (This is a silly comparison. But still fun.) The real comparison: Nvidia's $500+ billion of investments and commitments [2] is substantially more than any easing the Fed has done in the same time [3]. Monetarily, Nvidia is creating a lot of money in our economy. The good news: I have seen no evidence Nvidia has borrowed against its stock or othe…
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Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI
#128I've always found it interesting when corporations start acting like public institutions. When traditionally philosophical, social contract ideas apply to things like corporate governance. Or like here, where private structures get powerful and important enough to resemble government structures. The ideas we deal with when we discuss society and organization aren't exclusive to government, they relate to human nature…
Well the key difference making any superficial similarities fall apart is Nvidia does not have neutral economy-wide goals of maintaining small+stable inflation, near-full employment and stabilizing financial institutions like the Fed does. Nvidia is entirely self interested in protecting their own shareholder value (that includes the incestuous web of investments ultimately ending up spent on their GPUs).
The structure of the Fed is setup the way it is to limit the sort of self-serving, myopic political micromanaging that could be damaging to the economy at large. And, unlike a beneficiary of rapid growth like Nvidia, has (historically) tried to identify potential indicators warning of unsustainable bubbles that could lead to financial contagion and tries to mitigate that risk using the limited monetary tools available and their public soapbox.
A similar decision making structure would potentially be very undesirable to Nvidia shareholders as caution over long time horizons would likely produce what they would consider an excessively conservative, defensive strategy to avoid putting too much air into the bubble too quickly (at the expense of their valuation).
Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
NV gives out a $100 to Party A, who puts it in their bank. Bank takes $90 of that deposit (assuming 10% fractional reserve rule, no idea what the actual number is), and loans it out to party B, who pays it into either the same or another bank. Same rules apply -- except now it's down to $81 being loaned out, and so on and so forth, until that 100$ generated $1000 in total bank deposits. edit: of course, it's never ac…
There is no such thing as fractional reserve banking. The multiplier is a myth. Quite why this persists when the Bank of England debunked it in 2014 [0] is anybody’s guess. Just another of those concepts that is neat, plausible and wrong. [0]: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...
> There is no such thing as fractional reserve banking
Yes, there is. We just changed how we measure the fraction from a crude one like a reserve requirement (which takes zero account of asset quality or funding source) to finer and more-robust ones like capital and liquidity reqirements.
Banks still have to hold reserves. And those required reserves constrain their lending and thus the amount of money they can create. The limits just aren't the old-school reserve requirement.
Re: Nvidia is the central bank of AI
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
“as long as it’s cash flow continues” is doing a lot of optimistic heavy lifting. The whole premise of the circular financing worry is that Nvidia sits in the middle of all the guarantees made to companies like OpenAI. If any of those companies become insolvent, Nvidia is on the hook for it. Also Nvidia isn’t really creating money. The 500B number is third party capital that already exists (BX, Apollo, etc).
Yea, but they would have to become insolvent in a way that makes compute lose value. The reason Nvidia is comfortable making these deals is because if OpenAI can’t use the compute, someone else can. Granted OpenAI going insolvent likely means a drop in the value of compute…
> they would have to become insolvent in a way that makes compute lose value
They would have to go insolvent in a way that hits Nvidia revenue. Those are related by distinct factors, a difference that may matter in a crisis.