The AI Productivity Boom Is Here | Luigi Buttiglione
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Let's be clear, I definitely prefer one thing. I prefer The US thing. I think The US economy, The US market, in terms of return, is absolutely unbeaten. The history of The US over the last forty years or the so called exceptionalism, it has all to do with technology. This is one of those cases in which it matters to look at the so called neutral rate. On these occasions, productivity growth, as you said, skyrockets. So this means that the neutral rate most likely goes up quite a lot. I would not try to position the level of actual interest rates below the level of neutral interest rates. That
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Oh, it's my pleasure, absolutely, to be with you, Felix.
Yeah, it should be a great time. And for those that aren't aware of your background, you have a storied background. So I think it'd be great to just spend some minutes hearing a bit about your different positions and hats you've held throughout the years and how that's led to what you're up to today.
I've been a little bit of a globetrotter of economics because I started with academia, then I moved into central banking at the Bank of Italy and the European Central Bank. Then investment banking, I was the chief economist of Barclays Capital. Then I moved into hedge funds for fifteen years where I was chief strategist of a number of those. The last one was Brayvon Howard. Then in the last eight years, eight years ago I started this consultancy company. And basically for the first seven, eight years of history of this company we have been dealing with major players, so the largest hedge funds
macro, there
you go.
Yes. You also launched a, I noticed you also launched a Substack this week and you came out with an initial piece all about AI and productivity. This is, it's great timing because it's, that's been something I've been thinking a lot about personally, is trying to understand where do we go from here? How do we think about something that is potentially so disruptive and how does that impact the economy? And how do we even derive signal of what's occurring in the economy? So we'd love to start with our conversation there and hear about your perspective on AI and where do you believe it's, hype? I
I think disruptive is a nice word and disruptive is good. So the way we think of it, especially for The US, because for the time being, AI is mainly a US thing, it affects very little for the time being the rest of the world, but the way we see that is more of a blessing than a curse. Sometimes we hear of it as it was a curse, oh my goodness, there is AI around, how do we go from here? It's a good thing, there is no doubt. And I would say from that standpoint, the way we think of that is that it is not that different from previous major technological progress we have had in the past. Actually
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