Shravan has just begun. In the Hindu calendar it is the month dedicated to Shiva, the ascetic among the gods, and across northern India devotees mark it by giving up ordinary comforts, keeping fasts, and walking long distances to fetch water from the Ganga to offer at their local Shiva shrine. Poets have long used the same month as a backdrop for separation and longing between lovers — a season built, in one way or another, around waiting for something to end so something else can begin.
That idea of an ending that clears the way for a beginning is what keeps pulling me back to one particular story from Hindu mythology. I have told it before, and I want to tell it again, because I think we are approaching another one of those endings — a serious reset in asset prices.
The Churning of the Ocean
The devas and the asuras — the gods and the demons — had been at war for so long that both sides were spent. Neither could win, and neither had anything left to fight with. Exhausted, they turned to Vishnu for a way out. His advice was unusual: stop fighting each other and churn the cosmic ocean together instead, using Mount Mandara as the churning rod and the serpent Vasuki as the rope. Whatever the ocean gave up, they would share.
The churning was long and violent, and the ocean did not give up its treasures gently. The first thing to surface was Halahala, a poison so potent it threatened to destroy everything before the churning had even produced anything of value. Shiva volunteered and swallowed it, holding it in his throat rather than letting it pass further. Only after the poison was contained did the ocean release what everyone had actually been hoping for: wealth, wish-fulfilling treasures, and finally Amrita, the nectar that grants immortality.
Vishnu made sure the nectar went to the gods alone, tricking the demons out of their share so the balance of power would not tip too far. The gods grew stronger — but the story doesn’t end there. In Puranic literature, whenever the gods grew careless or forgot the common good, they were beaten back and had to be rescued again, usually after a long stretch of humility, by Vishnu, Shiva, or the Mother Goddess. Power gained is never kept automatically; it has to be re-earned.
Why this isn’t just a story
I don’t think this is a tale meant only for a festival evening and then forgotten. It maps unusually well onto how societies actually respond to shared crises — a prolonged war, a pandemic, a depression. Faced with a problem too big for any one side to solve alone, people are forced into collaboration: vaccines get developed, institutions like the UN get built, deterrents and safety nets and global markets get put in place. That collaboration is the churning.
In economic terms, the churning shows up as the stretch that follows a downturn — the period of loose money, aggressive investment, and heavy borrowing that policymakers and businesses turn to once they’ve run out of other options. Everyone involved does things they would never do in calmer times. Capacity gets built at a scale that looks absurd in hindsight, and asset prices climb to levels no conventional model can justify. Markets call this a “bubble”. And exactly like the myth, a bubble produces both nectar and poison at once — except the poison, this time, isn’t shared equally. It’s the financial investors who tend to drink it, while the productive capacity that got built along the way — the factories, the roads, the networks — usually survives the bust and keeps paying dividends to society long after the investors who financed it have been wiped out.
India’s own growth is a good illustration. It’s hard to picture the country’s IT and services industry reaching global scale without the late-1990s technology bubble that funded it. The 2000s housing, road, power, and cement capacity built across the country owes a lot to the subprime credit boom in the West. And the cheap capital that has since flowed to Indian entrepreneurs traces back, in no small part, to years of quantitative easing after the global financial crisis. In every case, the capacity outlasted the bubble that financed it — even as many of the entrepreneurs and financiers who built it ended up considerably poorer.
AI as the current churning
The years since the global financial crisis have been marked by weak growth, low inflation, aging populations, and stretched government budgets — a problem the Covid-19 pandemic made considerably worse. The scale of research and, especially, debt-financed capital that has since gone into building out artificial intelligence looks to me like the same kind of churning: an attempt to force a solution to a problem no single company or government could solve alone.
If the pattern holds, both the nectar and the poison of this churning are close to the surface now. The nectar is real productivity gains — the AI applications that genuinely make businesses more efficient and profitable, and that will go on rewarding the companies and investors behind them for years. The poison is what tends to follow an investment cycle like this one: debt that several AI developers won’t be able to service, business models that turn out not to be financially viable, and job losses at the legacy companies AI displaces.
My own reading is that financial investors, in particular, should brace for the poison stage — the point where asset prices reset and the excesses built up over this cycle get worked out of the system. Putting a date on that is guesswork by nature, but if I had to name one, I’d say from the second quarter of 2027.
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Progress, Peril and Robustness – 1
Progress, Peril and Robustness - 2