Video News/In Focus with Jeremy Szafron

(Kitco News) - The debt financing the artificial intelligence build-out carries the hallmarks of every major bubble that came before it, and the risk now extends into ordinary pension and insurance portfolios, according to Dr. Mark Thornton, senior fellow at the Mises Institute and author of The Skyscraper Curse. Speaking with Kitco News, Thornton said investors are buying 30-year bonds to finance data-center assets that may last only three years, calling it the kind of "financial chicanery" that has preceded past crises. He argued that all paper, dollar-denominated assets face a difficult future under current Fed policy, and that the AI data-center boom is this cycle's version of the record-breaking skyscraper that historically tops out just as a crisis begins. Thornton, who called the housing bubble in 2004 and endured years of criticism before being proven right, said Austrian economists tend to see crises coming long before the data confirms them. On gold, he praised Poland and China as "two of the most rational" nations for aggressively accumulating bullion while no G7 country ranks among the top buyers, calling the G7 "totally out to lunch."