When WSB Runs Its Own Macro: AI-Assisted Confidence Meets a Real Downturn

A research note that explicitly labeled itself a thought experiment moved institutional capital in February — not because it was validated, but because it was formatted with the grammar of authority. The Citrini post's structure — named year, named threshold, named cascade — mimicked the form of serious macro analysis closely enough that its scenario reached Wall Street desks before anyone asked whether the underlying model was defensible. This is the operating mechanism: when AI tools produce structured prose, they establish a template that human writers adopt, and the template…