Elizabeth Warren · Wall Street · Jamie Dimon · JPMorgan · Fortune Technology
Tech stocks just lost more than $1 trillion in a day—a gothic horror test for the ‘moats’ Warren Buffett taught Wall Street to
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Markets are ushering in a particularly gothic Halloween as the AI trade exposes a crumbling aristocratic pile of early 21st century capitalism.
Key facts
- In Hollywood, Warner Bros.’ R-rated body-horror film Clayface opened No. 1 the weekend of Oct. 23 with about $24 million, according to The Numbers
- PitchBook counted $131 billion of leveraged loans priced below 80 cents on the dollar, a common threshold for distress and the most since May 2020
- Its free cash flow came in at negative $9.1 billion, against the negative $2.23 billion analysts expected, per FactSet
- Big Tech lost nearly $900 billion in market value after another sharp rise in AI spending in the third quarter, the Financial Times calculated
Summary
Jamie Dimon has long talked to JPMorgan shareholders about the bank’s “fortress balance sheet.” His 2015 letter set aside a section to answer the question of what the phrase even meant. The gothic novel’s favorite picture of danger is a castle falling apart, and for about 250 years the two have traded images: the castle and the moat, the vampire, the creature built in a lab. Horror took 15.5% of the domestic box office in 2025, according to The Numbers, and U.S. horror book sales rose 7% through the first nine months of 2025, per Circana BookScan, while adult fiction overall grew 1%. The selling started with Alphabet.