Arthur Hayes Says AI Layoffs Are Coming for the Banking System | Markets Outlook

Arthur Hayes, chief investment officer of Maelstrom and co-founder of BitMEX, joins the Markets Outlook podcast from Miami to deliver a stark warning about the impending disruption AI will bring to the global labor market and banking system. He argues that AI-driven automation—evidenced by recent layoffs at companies like Coinbase and Block—will disproportionately impact the bottom 10–20% of knowledge workers, many of whom are highly compensated but now redundant. This mass job loss, combined with an over-leveraged global economy, threatens to collapse consumer spending and default rates, creating systemic risk for banks whose loan portfolios could rapidly devalue. Hayes contends that central banks, including the Fed, are blind to this 'AI deflation' because they view AI as a productivity enhancer rather than a destabilizing force, leading to insufficient money printing. Bitcoin, he claims, is already signaling this crisis by outperforming tech stocks and gold since the U.S.-Iran war began in February. He remains bullish on Bitcoin’s long-term potential, citing money printing from war and re-industrialization as key drivers, and sees Hyperliquid as a transformative decentralized trading platform with strong tokenomics and a growing role in global price discovery. Hayes also defends the value of privacy-focused assets like Zcash and predicts a rise in short-dated binary options markets, while dismissing fears that institutional adoption will kill altcoins—comparing them to the high failure rate of stocks in the S&P 500.