573: What If We're Entering an Entirely New Economic Era?

About this episode

Every once in a while, it's useful to zoom way out. Most of the time, we look at the economy as a collection of separate stories. The federal government is running enormous deficits. Stock market valuations are near historic extremes. China has emerged as America's greatest strategic competitor. Defense spending is ramping up. And hundreds of billions of dollars are pouring into artificial intelligence. But what if these aren't really separate stories? What if they are all consequences of a much larger transformation that has been taking place for more than 50 years? For most of modern economic history, there were hard limits on how much money and credit could be created. Gold was ultimately the constraint. Once that constraint disappeared, the world changed dramatically. Credit exploded. Global trade expanded. Interest rates fell. Asset prices soared. And American consumers were able to buy trillions of dollars of goods from the rest of the world without the old requirement that trade eventually balance. That system created extraordinary wealth. But it also had consequences that few people anticipated. One of the biggest beneficiaries was China. Over several decades, China went from a poor country to an industrial superpower and America's primary strategic competitor. Now that competition is producing another massive shift. The United States is preparing to spend significantly more on defense, semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, energy and technology. At exactly the same time, we are witnessing another enormous investment boom: artificial intelligence. The largest technology companies are now spending hundreds of billions of dollars building the infrastructure necessary for AI. And that raises some fascinating questions. Are we witnessing another speculative technology bubble? Or are we at the beginning of a productivity revolution significant enough to justify today's extraordinary investment? Could both be true? And what happens if artificial intelligence eventually makes not only information, but intelligence itself—and perhaps even labor—abundant? At that point, we may be talking about something much bigger than the next economic cycle. We may be talking about the evolution of the economic system itself. That's the subject of my conversation with economist Richard Duncan this week on Wealth Formula Podcast.