The 2026 Compass: How to Navigate Between Speculative Bubbles Without Losing Your Way

Wherever you look, it seems a bubble is lurking. We need a reliable compass to understand what is happening in the global financial markets. A hundred years after the Great Depression, patterns of speculative behavior are repeating with alarming precision, only now with different players: artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, and an attention-driven economy fueled by viral content.

When History Repeats: The Unlearned Lessons of the Past

Two months before Black Monday in 1929, Massachusetts economist Roger Babson warned of an imminent collapse after observing ordinary investors borrowing to buy stocks. His prediction was so accurate that a 3% drop was dubbed the “Babson Break.” However, in the following weeks, the market recovered driven by optimism generated by new consumer products: radio and automobiles.

Today, voices similar to Babson’s warn of a comparable but amplified phenomenon. The compass we need must point toward the true sources of systemic risk: not just artificial intelligence itself, but the frantic way its infrastructure is being financed.

The Attention Economy: Why Everyone Is Chasing the Same Opportunity

The hype around AI is dizzying. Tech companies are projected to invest less than $1.6 trillion annually in data centers by 2030, according to Omdia analysis, whose profit outlooks remain entirely speculative.

But the question isn’t simply whether we’re in an AI bubble. The real concern arises when we recognize that definitions of speculative bubbles are everywhere. Gold prices surged nearly 64% in 2025. Nations are accumulating debt at levels unseen since World War II. Börge Brende, CEO of the World Economic Forum, has directly pointed out this global fragility.

“Everyone is playing a game where they believe these technologies will solve any existing problem,” comments Advait Arun, climate finance analyst at the Center for Public Enterprise. His recent report, Bubble or Nothing, questions the financing schemes behind data centers. “We are definitely still in the irrational exuberance stage.”

Now more than ever, the benchmark for each investment is global. As W. David Marx explains in his book Blank Space: “Market participants go far beyond what they can see around them and their actual class. Globally aligned movements that were previously impossible can now emerge.”

Meme Cryptocurrencies: The Democratization of Financial Gambling

The most obvious financial absurdities are concentrated where intrinsic value is hard to calculate. Bitcoin, for example, accumulated gains of $636 billion from early 2025 until October, before experiencing significant corrections. As of February 2026, it trades around $67,580, down 2.37% in the last 24 hours according to the latest available data.

The meme coin phenomenon is even more revealing. Trading volume peaked at $170 billion in January 2025 before collapsing to $19 billion by September. The most extreme cases are $TRUMP and $MELANIA, launched by the former first family just two days before the January 20, 2025, inauguration.

Since their launch, both have recorded catastrophic losses. $TRUMP has fallen 78.92% in the past year, now trading at $3.24, while $MELANIA has plummeted 91.67%, trading at $0.12. These cryptocurrencies became clear symbols of pure speculative behavior: investors evaluating these assets not for their potential to generate fundamental value but solely for quick gains. They approached them like rolling dice in Las Vegas during vacation.

A recent Harris survey reveals concerning psychological dynamics: six out of ten Americans now aspire to extreme wealth. Among Generation Z and millennials, 70% dream of becoming multimillionaires, compared to 51% of Generation X and baby boomers. A 2024 study by Empower suggests that zoomers believe that “financial success” requires a nearly $600,000 salary and a net worth of $10 million.

The Phenomenon of Simultaneous Bubbles

Bubbles do not appear in isolation. In recent months, we have witnessed speculative cycles across multiple domains simultaneously. Popular culture experienced successive booms: first a bubble around Sydney Sweeney, then Pedro Pascal, followed by a massive obsession with the “6-7” trend dominating social media.

Thanks to K-pop celebrities like Lisa from Blackpink, a worldwide craze for Labubu, those zoomorphic plush toys from Pop Mart International Group, emerged. In food, obvious protein bubbles are forming, with brands competing to position themselves in a saturated market of consumers interested in GLP-1 diets. In media, a bubble of newsletters on Substack, celebrity podcasts, and authorized biographical documentaries launched on Netflix almost weekly.

This multiplicity of simultaneous bubbles points to a deeper phenomenon: the attention economy. Everyone learns at the same time about new money-making opportunities via TikTok, group chats, Reddit forums, and the instant nature of the internet. Apple TV’s series Pluribus, dramatizing a humanity subjected to collective consciousness, is especially timely as a metaphor for this moment.

The Cumulative Risk: When Speculation Turns into Systemic Fragility

The implications for global financial infrastructure are severe. Many financial analysts warn of a specific bubble in private credit, a $3 trillion market of loans issued by large investment firms operating outside the regulated banking system. Jeffrey Gundlach, founder of DoubleLine Capital, called it “junk credit” on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, was more direct: “a recipe for a financial crisis.”

Oracle Corp., a traditional database company, is raising $38 billion in debt to build data centers in Texas and Wisconsin. Neo-cloud companies like CoreWeave Inc. and Fluidstack Ltd., specializing in AI infrastructure and crypto mining, are also borrowing aggressively.

“When entities are building data centers worth tens of billions with borrowed money and no confirmed real clients, that’s when I start to worry,” says Gil Luria, CEO of D.A. Davidson & Co., echoing Roger Babson’s warning spirit a hundred years later. “Lending money for a speculative investment is never a good idea.”

A Compass for the Future: Innovation versus Speculation

Carlota Perez, a researcher who has spent decades analyzing economic cycles, offers a crucial historical perspective. She warns that technological innovation is turning into high-risk speculation within a casino economy that is over-leveraged, fragile, and bubble-prone. “If artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies collapse, they would probably trigger an unimaginable global crash,” she wrote.

However, Perez also offers a historical lesson: true productive golden ages only emerge when finance faces the consequences of its own behavior rather than being rescued, and society channels it through proper regulation.

The compass for 2026 must point toward this critical distinction: it’s not about rejecting innovation but differentiating it from speculation. Until we achieve that balance, Labubu and meme cryptocurrencies will remain symbols of an era where it’s impossible to tell where opportunity ends and systemic risk begins.