The “circular deals” among AI titans increasingly resemble the “daisy chains” of the 1980s savings-and-loan crisis. Forty years ago, interconnected transactions obscured the dangers, multiplied systemic risks and helped inflate asset values before roughly a third of US thrift banks failed. Today’s financial engineering – an incestuous ecosystem of interlocking multi-year commitments to provide financing, buy semiconductors, secure gigawatts of power and lease data centres – could meet a similar...