AI Is the Market, and the Market Is the Government
The stock market has never been the economy - it’s really a reflection of what the economy dreams it could be in a world where share buybacks translate to meaningful productivity.
as AI swallows up more and more capital, it is both the economy and the stock market - and the government.
As long as portfolios are green, the electorate stays somewhat calm. The administration is effectively borrowing confidence from the AI bubble. Speculation has become governance.
The equity market believes the AI story overrides everything else. The gold market believes something is fundamentally breaking. They’re both reacting to the same underlying reality, but they just have different theories about what happens next.
Both gold and equities are surging because they’re hedging different kinds of collapse. Gold trades on fear of the system. AI trades on faith in the story. That both are rallying tells you something about where we are.
This is what it means to live in the United States of AI. Democracy as an asset class or something. For now, the line keeps going up. But speculation isn’t stability, and the permission government borrows from investors is never really its own.