Jane Smorodnikova
Jane Smorodnikova, writing in her December 2025 AI Bubble Survival Guide, mapped the Minsky-Kindleberger five-stage model directly onto the AI cycle and concluded that the market had already entered Stage Four — the profit-taking stage where 'early holders are converting paper to cash while the music plays.' Her analysis represented one of the most explicit applications of Kindleberger's framework to real-time AI investment decisions, combining financial analysis with historical pattern recognition in a manner that Kindleberger himself would have appreciated.
In the AI Story
Whether Smorodnikova's specific timing is correct is unknowable in advance. Kindleberger was characteristically adamant that the pattern is reliable while the timing is not. What her analysis demonstrates is the utility of explicit framework application to real-time investment decisions — the discipline of asking, at each stage of a technology cycle, which Kindleberger stage the market currently occupies and what the framework predicts about the transition to the next stage.
Her identification of Stage Four as the profit-taking stage captures the specific insider behavior during the transition from euphoria to critical stage. The insiders are not panicking. They are realizing gains that were priced to the genuine displacement, locking in returns before the market reprices to reflect the gap between extrapolation and reality. The outsiders entering at the prices the insiders are selling at are entering at higher prices, with less information, and with less ability to distinguish genuine opportunity from euphoric markup.
Smorodnikova's work joins a small but growing body of contemporary financial analysis that explicitly deploys Kindleberger's framework rather than merely echoing its conclusions. Simon Johnson's Project Syndicate essays, Damodaran's SaaSpocalypse analyses, and Smorodnikova's survival guide together constitute the early phase of what may become a more systematic integration of historical crisis analysis with contemporary investment practice. The integration has been partial so far. Its further development is among the institutional goods the AI transition most requires.
Origin
Smorodnikova's AI Bubble Survival Guide was published online in December 2025 through her investment analysis platform, emerging from the broader community of financial analysts attempting to apply historical frameworks to the AI cycle.
Key Ideas
Explicit stage identification. Her analysis mapped the AI cycle onto specific Kindleberger stages in real time.
Stage Four diagnosis. Profit-taking as the transition from euphoria to critical stage.
Framework as investment tool. Kindleberger's taxonomy applied to real-time decision-making.
The music plays on. The structural irony that the euphoric expansion continues even as insiders exit.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Jane Smorodnikova, AI Bubble Survival Guide (December 2025)
- Simon Johnson, 'The AI Speculative Boom' (Project Syndicate)
- Aswath Damodaran, SaaSpocalypse valuation essays
- Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes