June 30th, 2028: The unemployment rate printed 10.2% this morning, a 0.3% upside surprise. The market sold off 2% on the number, bringing the cumulative drawdown in the S&P to 38% from its October 2026 highs.Traders have grown numb. Six months ago, a print like this would have triggered a circuit breaker.

This is not a Hollywood sci-fi script. It is the chilling opening of the report titled The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis by Citrini Research.

The "apocalyptic" document struck a nerve with Wall Street’s current "AI anxiety," triggering a massive sell-off. On the day of release, the Dow plunged 800 points, and the Software and Services index hit its lowest level since "Liberation Day" tariffs were announced in 2026. Tech giant IBM plummeted 13.1%, its largest single-day drop in 25 years.

The reaction was so severe that senior White House economic advisors were forced to intervene, publicly dismissing the report as "science fiction."

The man behind the storm is 33-year-old James van Geelen. Having gained fame in 2022 for accurately shorting Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), his independent firm—boasting only 10 employees—now has over 170,000 paid subscribers on Substack, ranking first in the financial category.

On March 2, National Business Daily (NBD) had an exclusive interview with James van Geelen. Regarding the market turmoil, he appeared somewhat resigned: "I am very surprised that the market took a hypothetical scenario with a 10% to 15% probability and treated it as an immediate reality."

"Prepare the system for potential scenario and in hopes that would make it less likely to come"

Nominal GDP repeatedly printed mid-to-high single-digit annualized growth. Productivity was booming. Real output per hour rose at rates not seen since the 1950s, driven by AI agents that don’t sleep, take sick days or require health insurance.

-THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS

NBD：The market experienced sharp sell-offs after your article was published. Did you anticipate such a reaction?

James van Geelen：No, I was very surprised the market took a hypothetical scenario which we attribute perhaps a 10%-15% chance to and immediately assumed it was relevant today. That was surprising.

NBD：As the 33-year-old founder of Citrini Research, what motivated you to publish such a controversial and influential analysis?

James van Geelen：Our firm has been bullish on the infrastructure for AI and the bottlenecks presented by the buildout since early 2023 - shortly after the release of ChatGPT 3. We’ve actually received criticism in the past for being “too bullish”. 

As an investor, it is key to understand all potential scenarios - especially ones that threaten your positioning. Seeing AI capabilities progress as rapidly as they have, in an exponential fashion, this was the first time we considered the concept of a society-wide transition that occurs (unlike previous technological revolutions) over the span of 3-5 years.

I wanted to start a conversation that prepared the system for this potential scenario, in the hopes that would make it less likely to come to fruition.

Photo/AIGC

"I'm not to predict but have pre-mortem asks assuming the worst outcome already happened"

AI capabilities improved, companies needed fewer workers, white collar layoffs increased, displaced workers spent less, margin pressure pushed firms to invest more in AI, AI capabilities improved…

It was a negative feedback loop with no natural brake. 

-THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS

NBD：You chose to write in the format of a "macro memo from June 2028," as if looking back on events that haven't happened yet. What inspired you to adopt this creative approach?

James van Geelen：The point of the piece was not to predict the future. It was to describe a transmission mechanism that is underexplored and to argue that the financial system hasn't been stress-tested for it. 

The reasoning behind the format was to allow people to engage with the scenario without having to agree with all of it. That lowered the barrier to considering it as a whole. 

I think it touched a nerve because a lot of people are privately worried about this and nobody had put the full chain of logic on paper. Not just 'AI takes jobs' but the second and third-order effects: what happens to mortgages, to credit, to tax receipts, to the financial system.   

If you say the credit cycle turned, you have to show where the bodies were buried in private credit and who was holding the exposure. 

The format disciplines the thinking.

NBD：You emphasized that this is "a scenario, not a prediction." What methodology did you use to construct this scenario?

James van Geelen：Agentic autonomy has gone from roughly 2 minutes to 16 hours over the past two years.

I took that trend and asked: what happens if it continues? Not forever, just for another 18-24 months. What does the world look like if agents can handle multi-day tasks reliably by late 2027? 

Then I traced the transmission mechanism. 

This is what we do as thematic equity analysts. You identify a structural shift and then you follow the chain of causation through the economy: who wins, who gets displaced first, what is dependent on the status quo continuing and who has the highest upside to it changing. 

Instead of focusing on the first bounce of the ball, try to visualize where the second and third are. 

In risk management, a pre-mortem asks: assume the worst outcome already happened, now work backward and explain how we got there. That's what this piece does. It assumes a crisis occurred and then constructs the most plausible chain of events that could have produced it. 

To do so, we grounded the piece in real structures. The scenario just asks what happens to those real structures under a specific stress. 

We actually use similar exercises to evaluate analyst candidates. We give them a hypothetical future scenario and ask them to assess it, construct trades around it, identify the transmission mechanisms. 

Photo/AIGC

"AI targets high-earning white-collar professional"

By February 2027, it was clear that still employed professionals were spending like they might be next. They were working twice as hard (mostly with the help of AI) just to not get fired, hopes of promotion or raises were gone. Savings rates ticked higher and spending softened.

-THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS

NBD：Your article provides detailed analysis of how multiple industries will be disrupted by AI. What common characteristics do these industries share?

James van Geelen：Essentially the article all boils down to speed. The speed of capability improvement and the speed of adoption. Many have said, in response, that consumer adoption of new technology follows an S-curve - that’s true for new form factors such as the internet or the smartphone. 

I think it is less true for things that are introduced as a feature into an already existing and widely adopted technology. 

So, the core commonality between companies that have the highest risk of being disrupted I think is that they monetize friction. Friction that exists because of human interaction. 

We could see margins on things that agents can do easily diminish, whether that’s due to agentic shoppers price matching or agentic assistants taking care of tedious tasks like refunds, government filings or subscription management. 

How many subscriptions do we have that we have not used for 6 months but are too lazy to cancel? That kind of thing can change. 

NBD：How is this transformation fundamentally different from any previous technological revolution in history? Are there any industries or positions that could survive this transformation?

James van Geelen：Every previous technological revolution displaced either physical labor or routine cognitive tasks, and it did so slowly enough for the labor market to absorb the shock. 

The agricultural revolution took 50 years to move 90% of the workforce off farms. The industrial revolution played out over decades. Computerization automated the back office over a 20-year cycle. 

In each case, the displaced workers had time to retrain, the new jobs being created paid comparably, and critically, the displaced cohort was not the one whose income the entire consumer credit system was underwritten against. 

This is different on all three counts. 

The speed is compressed from decades to years if the capability curve holds. 

The target is the high-earning white-collar professional whose $150K-300K salary supports a jumbo mortgage, discretionary spending, and a tax base that funds the social safety net. 

And the technology improves after adoption, which has never happened before: a tractor didn't get better at farming every quarter, but the AI tool you deployed in January is materially more capable by June. 

As for what survives, anything requiring a physical body in a specific place has a long runway (electricians, plumbers, surgeons, first responders), anything where the human relationship is the product rather than the analysis behind it retains value (wealth advisors will outlast the analysts who support them, trial lawyers will outlast the associates who draft their briefs), and ironically the trades that a generation of parents steered their kids away from in favor of "knowledge work" may end up being the most durable careers in the economy.

NBD：What specific advice do you have for ordinary people who may be replaced by AI?

James van Geelen：This isn’t my area of expertise or my job. I think historically, it has worked out pretty well for people who attempt to envision the opportunities presented by new technologies and align their skillset to be most conducive to that, but I have no crystal ball and should not be giving people life advice. 

NBD：You emphasized that this is not "AI doom-mongering." Do you consider yourself an optimist or a pessimist?

James van Geelen：In the words of Winston Churchill, “I am an optimist, I don’t see much point in being anything else".

I know for a fact that humanity will adapt to this, as we have to previous technological advancements. The purpose of the piece is to encourage policymakers, investors and enterprises to consider the range of outcomes, and be more prepared to deal with the transition period that those outcomes bring about. 

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