In theater, the stage is built with three visible walls. The fourth wall is implied — the invisible barrier between actor and audience. When a character turns and speaks directly to the camera, the illusion dissolves. The audience sees the machinery.
It’s what’s known in the business as “breaking the 4th wall” or “piercing the veil.”
Today, we’re going to pierce the veil a bit in the Swan Dive.
Researchers at Citrini Research spent 100 hours last week constructing a scenario they call the 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis. It is not a forecast. They phrased it as a “scenario” in which AI destroys the real economy before the next U.S. presidential election.
They didn’t include much politics; we’re only making this observation because of the dates they assigned to the scenarios.
Their imagined headline reads June 30, 2028: unemployment prints 10.2%, a 0.3% upside surprise. The S&P 500 falls 2% on the day and sits 38% below its October 2026 peak. Traders barely react. Six months earlier, that same print would have triggered a circuit breaker.
The scenario reconstructs how the sequence began.
In late 2025, the story goes, agentic coding tools improved in a step-function manner.
Early 2026 brought white-collar layoffs. Margins expanded. Earnings beat expectations. Stocks continued to rally. Then, corporate profits got recycled directly into AI compute.
Nominal GDP printed mid-to-high single digits. “Productivity” surged. Real output per hour rose at rates not seen since the 1950s. GPU clusters ran continuously. Health insurance costs disappeared from payroll.
Owners of compute accumulated wealth. Wage growth for corporate employees and hourly workers compressed. Workers displaced from white-collar roles moved down the income ladder. Economists coined the phrase “Ghost GDP” — output that registers in national accounts but does not circulate through households.
One data center in North Dakota replaced the income stream of 10,000 Manhattan professionals. Machines did not purchase homes. They did not lease vehicles. They did not dine out.
Velocity of money flattened. Mortgage underwriting tightened. Private equity portfolios loaded with ARR assumptions met their first true default cycle in mid-2027. By November 2027, correlated bets on white-collar productivity unraveled in sequence.
That is The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis scenario as outlined by Citrini Research. We’re doing our bit to watch the Citrini scenario go viral just by writing about it today.
Markets charge tuition for ignoring second-order effects. So what are they in the present? Let’s take a look…
What Is Seen and What Is Unseen
Back in the present, the S&P 500 has traded in a 3.7% range over the past two months — less than half the 20-year median of 8.6%. One of the tightest ranges in modern history.
In trader parlance, the indexes are “flat,” a setup that often materializes before a sell-off at the top after a multi-year bull market.
Goldman Sachs told its own traders to be aware that institutional trading activity resembles a VIX reading near 35. Rather than a reading of 20, where the VIX has been trading over that same 2-month period.
The U.S. software ETF, IGV, tested its April 2025 lows last week and trades roughly 35% below its peak. The “SaaS-pocalypse” in software companies reflects the fear of Citrini’s 2028 scenario happening in real time. That divergence now exceeds the spread seen at the peak of the Great Financial Crisis.
Under the surface, the “great rotation” we wrote about last week is threatening to widen.
In a report released on February 17, 2026, Morgan Stanley identified the “HALO” trade (High-Asset, Liquid, and Organized) as a strategy for boosting its own portfolio into hard assets, similar to the advice we’ve been giving here at Swan Dive for the better part of 18 months.
Corporate America Rewrites Itself
Layoffs will make headlines. They always do. Large corporations are aggressively deploying AI systems.
What does not make headlines are the retained workers who learn to deploy AI tools and preserve their roles. Nor the roles, jobs, titles, or strategies that do not yet exist but will.
The Information Revolution eliminated switchboard operators and travel agents. It created cybersecurity analysts and cloud architects. You can book your own flights and vacations. Even switch your seat.
If you’re old enough to remember forgetting your travel agent’s phone number and trying to find a pay phone and the yellow pages, you know what progress has been made since the 2000-01 tech wreck on Wall Street.
The productivity revolution offered by agentic AI will be similar. There will be a time when we think “oh yea, that’s before we could Google it.” New verbs will even be added to the Oxford English Dictionary to help describe the impact AI will have on our lives.
It’ll be great.
Until politicians arrive to help out.
Between now and 2028, corporate America will restructure around “compute density.” Productivity gains flow to balance sheets first, pocket books second. Political response will try to ride the whole wave with false promises, just as they always do.
The Veil, Pierced
In the meantime, we turn to you directly.
We use AI in this publication. We use it for research, synthesis, and testing macro logic. We also use an AI-driven indicator to refine trade timing inside the Grey Swan Trading Fraternity.
We have used our AI indicator to identify a trade leading up to the President’s State of the Union Address tomorrow, for example.
The macro logic runs as follows:
- Gold supply remains structurally constrained.
- Central banks continue accumulating reserves.
- Sovereign debt levels expand. Including in the U.S. under Trump’s efforts to realign the global economy for the benefit of U.S. citizens.
- Gold mining equities have begun outperforming the metal itself.
- Our pick for the trade is approaching a production catalyst on a large development asset.
With all that data at our disposal, the Grey Swan Indicator has aligned the trade with President Trump’s State of the Union tomorrow evening. And helps us pick an entry price and duration for the trade.
And like that, the macro thesis becomes trade execution.
Vault Steel and Scarcity
On Friday, we’ll be visiting Wayde Milas, President of the Rare Coin Company of America in Willowbrook, Illinois. RARCOA remains the oldest continuously operating rare coin wholesaler in the United States.
Our friend and honorary Grey Swan member, Milas acquired the firm from his own father in 2009 and served as President of the Professional Numismatists Guild from 2022–2024.
We’re going to pierce the veil again when we take you into the vault in Willowbrook on Grey Swan Live! Friday afternoon, February 27, at 2pm EST.
This is going to be a fun one… provided the weather cooperates between now and then!
We’ll get a rundown on how the wholesale industry for rare coins works. Rare coins derive value from scarcity, certified condition, and historical permanence. Mint marks matter. Surviving population counts matter. Professional grading matters.
There’s a certain amount of certainty that comes from hard assets you don’t get from the stock market or speculating on tech trends.
For almost 40 years, the American Silver Eagle has dominated the coin market with over 640,000,000 minted to date. These hefty silver dollars are made from one ounce of 99.9% fine silver and have become the standard for silver coins worldwide. For the first time, they’ll be releasing “Double Eagle” Silver coins. We’ll get full details on the sets reserved for Grey Swan Investment Fraternity Members on Friday (Source: Rare Coin Company of America, Rarcoa)
Wayde and the team at Rarcoa have also reserved sets from the first 50,000 print form the US Mint of the 2025 Eagle Privy Silver Eagle graded NGC MS70 for Grey Swan Investment Fraternity members.
Attendees to the live event online will get a first-come, first-serve shot at the “event pricing,” which includes a substantial discount to the resale price on the coin sets.
Similar proof Silver Eagles honoring the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps — graded PF70 with First Day of Issue pedigree and labels signed by former U.S. Mint engraver Michael Gaudioso — typically retail at $695. Event pricing adjusts accordingly.
Scarcity in rare coins operates on a different clock than the big equity indexes we’re always anxious about. These are tangible, real-world items you can hold in your hand and store in your own vault.
On The Rhyme of History
A final historical note: in our day and age, the gossip columns, which unfortunately also include the U.S. House of Representatives, can not get enough of the Epstein Files.
The former Prince Andrew was arrested on Friday in connection with more shenanigans that happened between him and Jeffrey Epstein when the latter pedophile was still alive. But weird sex parties are hardly a novelty among the global elite
In 1892, Berlin’s gossip columns were filled with unsigned letters alleging misconduct among the Kaiser’s inner circle at Jagdschloss Grunewald. The Kotze Affair stained the House of Hohenzollern and weakened public perception of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
~ Addison
P.S. Grey Swan Live! this week takes us from space to hard assets in the vault!
As we mentioned above, please join us for our visit with Wayde Milas inside the Rarcoa vault to check out the 2025 Eagle Privy Silver Eagle graded NGC MS70. The event will air on Friday, February 27, 2026, at 2 p.m. EST/11 a.m. PST.
And if you haven’t yet, check out the replay of last week’s Grey Swan Live!
We welcomed back Matt Milner, of Private Market Profits, gave us a tour of – and a strategy for – investing in the massive private capital markets usually reserved for well-connected investors: the pre-IPO space – an area where America continues to hone its GDP edge.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril have grabbed headlines this year as their unicorn giants approach their very public launch into the AI stock market.
Matt Milner created a way to get access to these companies before they go public. For a deep dive and access to what could be the first IPO to be valued at $1 trillion, please take a look right here: Elon’s IPO.
