Paul Krugman

But, you know, that bubble was in large part telecoms companies rather than dot coms.

And the telecoms companies had real revenue and just not enough to justify the valuations.

And the technological, the technology actually did deliver.

Maybe not on quite the ethical scale that people had hoped for, but we really did get a decade of substantially accelerated productivity growth out of the technology.

So it was, it was real stuff.

What happened was that the idea that early movers and we're going to be able to, as we now say, build a moat around their position, that they were going to be able to earn sustained high profits.

turned out to be wrong.

And in many ways, we look similar now.

I think we're past the point of wondering whether AI is actually going to do anything useful.

We still don't know how much useful it's going to do, but it's clearly something real.

And there's real revenues coming in.

But on the other hand, the valuations are far, far above anything that you would normally expect from those revenues.

So the valuations depend on the belief

that these are going to lead to entrenched positions for the existing companies.

Yeah.

And not just that the U.S.

will continue to dominate, but that the MAG-7 will continue to dominate and that there won't be some contender, U.S.

contender, European contender,

You know, it's worth remembering that although European macroeconomics doesn't look too good, there's a whole lot of, it's not as if the technological sophistication is restricted to the United States.

And so, and it's really hard.