One good example of a bubble that usually deflates slowly is the housing market. The housing market goes through cycles, and those bubbles very rarely pop. It popped in 2008 because banks were simultaneously caught with their hands in the candy jar by lying about risk levels of loans, so when foreclosures started, it caused a domino effect. In most cases, the fed just raises rates and housing prices naturally fall as demand falls, but in 2008, part of the problem was that banks kept selling bad loans despite high mortgage rates and high housing prices, all because they knew they could sell those loans off to another bank and make some quick profit (like a game of hot potato).

In the case of AI, I don’t think it’ll be the fed raising rates to cool the market (that market isn’t impacted as much by rates), but the industry investing more to try to revive it. So Nvidia is unlikely to totally crash because it’ll be propped up by Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, and Microsoft, Apple, and Google will keep pitching different use cases to slow the losses as businesses pull away from AI. That’s quite similar to how the fed cuts rates to spur economic investment (i.e. borrowing) to soften the impact of a bubble bursting, just driven from mega tech companies instead of a government.

At least that’s my take.