Hello, Free Lunch readers. I’m Tej Parikh, the FT’s economics leader writer, and I am standing in for Martin Sandbu this week. In the same vein as my last piece — where I took on the “hot US economy” — I play contrarian again, this time with artificial intelligence.
“Narratives are a major vector of rapid change in culture, in zeitgeist, and in economic behaviour,” wrote Nobel laureate Robert Shiller in his 2019 book Narrative Economics.
Today’s dominant economic and market narrative is the transformative potential of AI. Although US interest rates have risen to their highest in two decades, and economic momentum is easing, the S&P 500 has been pushing higher, driven in part by the frenzy for AI-linked stocks.