The book Capital Returns: Investing Through the Capital Cycle details this phenomenon, including historical cases.

If anything, it shows it's possible for you to arbitrage this and in doing so help "smooth out the cycle."

Is the DRAM industry really capitalist? Focusing on just the Korean parties, it functions like a command economy. I would say the same about most high end semi-conductor manufacturing, TSMC, Intel, ASML are being commanded and driven by nation-state level decision making. Right now the command is to focus on high wattage centralized AI systems at the expense of everything else.

> Capitalists claim that this is optimal.

Because that does not happen exactly as you say for all players. The demand signals will be processed and long-term risk is balanced against short-term gain in a distributed fashion, so not everyone will do the same.

Forecasting demand 5 years into the future is intrinsically highly unreliable. It doesn’t matter if it is capitalism or a command economy. The bet is always going to be risky and someone will have to pay for that risk.

At least with capitalism you have many different people with different perspectives on the risk making independent bets. That mitigates the more extreme negative outcomes.

>Capitalists claim that this is optimal.

It's more optimal than planned economies until we have AI planned economies with realtime feedback, I guess.

Consumers get cheap goods during oversupply and most inefficient companies get elliminated during bust while consolidation leads to economies of scale.

It's not optimal, it's pathological. Definitely better than starving under communist dictatorships though.