In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Martin Wolf discuss Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” the impact it will have on Trump’s supporters, and whether the United States is facing a looming economic crisis.

Now, obviously, American corporations are genuinely strong in certain sectors. I’m not saying this is identical to Japan in the 1980s. But if you look at standard measures of value relative to underlying earnings, the American stock market today is as highly valued as at any point since the 1880s—as high as in 1929, as high as in 1999. Despite all the problems we’ve discussed, nothing seems to affect these valuations. The implicit assumption is that the American corporate sector—and above all the tech sector, which plays such a dominant role—will go on extracting ever-greater monopoly profits indefinitely, and that those profits will sustain these market valuations. All I can say is: given the politics in America, the global political response to America, and the attacks on the rule of law, on research, and so forth, I find that story very difficult to believe. It seems to be a story people are clinging to because it has played out well in recent decades.

But I would be very surprised if, 20 or 30 years from now, we still saw this phenomenon. Maybe that’s partly because the idea that AI will generate limitless profit booms for the tech sector will turn out to be just as exaggerated as the internet bubble in the late 1990s. There may be perfectly good reasons why the profits from AI will accrue largely to users, and those users will be everywhere, not just in the United States. Meanwhile, the companies investing zillions in building these extremely expensive AI models may not see much of a return. That’s completely consistent, by the way, with what has happened in every major technological revolution in the past, from railways onward.