The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 83, January 2026 Page 11 The artificial intelligence (AI) bubble is receiving a growing amount of attention. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) , in its December quarterly magazine, offers both reassurance and caution. It appreciates the strong earnings of the sector, which, in reality, presented mixed results in the third quarter, with a few business groups advancing and others treading water, while one of the frontrunners, OpenAI, forecasts losses until 2030. It was Nvidia, with its strong profits, that revived the sector's euphoria. After three years of acceleration, which raised the weight of the Magnificent Seven from 20% to 35% on Wall Street, the BIS sees signs of a retrenchment due to wariness about stretched valuations and episodes of volatility . It considers the optimistic expectations to be well-founded and, in this respect, the AI trend – which the bank never refers to as a bubble – is d...

On August 15 th , 1971 (50 years ago) US President Richard Nixon declared that the ‘gold window’ was closed. The era of the convertibility of the dollar to gold was over, and the system that had been agreed upon by the victors of the war at Bretton Woods in 1944 collapsed: the regime of fixed but subject to periodical reviews exchange rates had lasted a quarter of a century. Jeffrey Garten, Bill Clinton’s former Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade and managing director of the Blackstone Group and Lehman Brothers, is now a historian who has written about Nixon’s decision. He recalls that the turnaround came at a time when the amount of dollars in circulation in the world was four times the amount of gold held in reserve, inflation was rising, Washington was withdrawing troops from Vietnam, and Nixon, the month before, had announced his visit to Beijing, a historic event. In 1959, the economist Robert Triffin had explained to Congress that there were absurdities assoc...