{"podcast":{"title":"Paul Krugman Podcast","slug":"paul-krugman-podcast-7703924","podcast_index_feed_id":7703924,"rss_url":"https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/277517.rss","website_url":"https://paulkrugman.substack.com/podcast","image_url":"https://substackcdn.com/feed/podcast/277517/97debc08d318fda1d382063e54848600.jpg","author":"Paul Krugman","episode_count":81,"summary":"Notes on economics and more","last_synced_at":"2026-07-26T10:17:51.645609+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924"},"episode":{"title":"The Chips Are Down","slug":"the-chips-are-down","published_at":"2026-06-24T10:30:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/the-chips-are-down","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924","url":"https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-chips-are-down","audio_url":"https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/203306855/6b087980483cca7a0c131151e1c4a757.mp3","summary":"For all my interviews and more, subscribe on YouTube . A short talk in lieu of a post. Back on full duty tomorrow. Transcript : Hi, Paul Krugman here. I’m recording this on Tuesday afternoon. I just won’t have time to write a normal post for tomorrow when you’ll see this. And I would take the day off, except it seemed to me as if people might want some reaction to the carnage that’s been going on, at least in part of the tech sector and stock markets around the world, which has been pretty remarkable. It’s really tempting to say that it’s deeply meaningful. But in general, you want to be very cautious about putting too much stake in stock market events. I’ll come back to that in a minute. But it is striking enough that it does seem to be worth commenting on. So what’s happened? There’s been a fall in tech stocks very much concentrated in semiconductors. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index was down almost 8%. on Tuesday. The KOSPI Korean Index, which is largely a semiconductor index, was down just about 10% sort of the previous day or the same day, you know, time zones. And there was a 2.2% fall in the NASDAQ. We’ve seen a lot of decline in tech stocks, things related above all to chips. What’s going on there? Part of the answer is that trying to understand why the market does what it does is, generally speaking, a mug’s game. In this case, however, it does seem that part of what’s happening, probably a large part of what’s happening, is that the tone, the rhetoric surrounding use of AI, and hence the demand for compute, has really shifted quite a lot just very recently. All of a sudden, we have a spate of studies that seem to show that, yeah, AI models allow people to churn out a lot more stuff, but the actual payoff to that stuff is much, much smaller than the volume…","meta_description":"For all my interviews and more, subscribe on YouTube . A short talk in lieu of a post. Back on full duty tomorrow. Transcript : Hi, Paul Krugman here. I’m…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":643,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/episodes/the-chips-are-down/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/the-chips-are-down.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}