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Trump admin is engineering a massive restructuring of global capital with the intent of making America richer. It runs a spectrum from factories and reshoring to taking the oil from Venezuela. DEI Disparate Impact theories are being unwound so that productive talent that was locked up by politics will no longer be locked up. Welfare migrants are being deported and America's balance sheet is shifting toward productive economic activity again.
The global future looks very mixed as population decline will hit the entire world. Fewer people means less capital to spend and fewer things to spend capital on. Bad news if you're China or Russia or Europe or Brazil. But this will make America even more attractive for capital and investment, relative to everywhere else. We will have factories, oil, gas, tech, services, military strength, capital, youth, growth, everything.
The market is already starting to price in this future. AI and datacenters are the headline boom feeding a lot of optimism, and it might come crashing down. But the underlying economic picture is very potentially strong because the fundamentals of the American economy are stable, and getting stronger. And, to my mind, AI unlocks so many economic opportunities that it will find a purpose eventually. If it does come crashing down it will be more like the dot-com bubble than full 2008. Because a technology that transforms electricity into intellectual work is enormously productive in real terms, not just fake email job terms. The dot-com bubble killed billions of dollars of imagined wealth locked up in companies like Pets.com. But, fundamentally, there was nothing Pets.com was doing that isn't being done today. They were just ahead of the curve.
Besides, despite all evidence to the contrary, the government has learned from some of its mistakes, and I don't think they'll repeat the dot-com bubble fiasco. Washing and Bessent and DOD and Trump will funnel billions of dollars in government contracts to the AI companies, and that will keep everybody afloat. The consequences will be an entirely new set of problems relating to economic management out of Washington central offices as the greatest economic change in the means of production since the Managerial Revolution plays out. It won't even be entirely a good set of changes. But they will probably fuel a lot of medium-term growth in the terms we're talking about here, and the negative consequences will be something we will spend the rest of our lives disentangling.
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