Even Nouriel Roubini is sounding bullish these days.
The economist — who rose to prominence for correctly predicting the 2008 financial crisis — is now betting that artificial intelligence will anchor a new era of US exceptionalism, lifting economic growth to as high as 4% by the end of the decade. Productivity is already accelerating and the gains from AI, he argues, could outweigh the combined drag of tariffs, fiscal risks and geopolitical shocks by a four-to-one ratio.
“Technology is first order,” Roubini said in an interview with Bloomberg Television Tuesday. “Everything else, including geopolitics, is second order.”
Technology should drive around half of that potential 4% growth, he said. While the maximum impact from an “empirical point of view,” of all the disruptive policies of the Trump administration — ranging from immigration restrictions to attacks on central bank independence — will be a 50 basis-points drag.
“Tech trumps tariffs,” Roubini said.
While the war in Ukraine and tensions between the US and China persist, Roubini is downplaying their market impact. Geopolitical risks, with a few exceptions, have largely been ignored by the market in the last few decades, he said.
Oil wobbled briefly during the Israel-Iran clash in mid-2025, he noted, but financial markets quickly looked through it. The global economy appears far more resilient to external shocks than investors assume, per Roubini, who also runs Roubini Macro Associates. It’s much the same with Venezuela, where the “macro and market implication are close to zero,” he added.
Artificial general intelligence, the hypothetical next leg of development in AI, is poised to propel the US to its next economic leap.
“It’s a race between US and China. I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game. US is going to do well. China’s going to do well. But my estimate is that the US potential growth is estimated today to be only 1.8%, could be as high 4% by the end of the decade.”
While valuations across the sector show signs of froth, Roubini argues that the gains made by AGI systems that will be capable of outperforming humans across most economically valuable tasks will justify the premium. Roubini, who is also a Hudson Bay Capital senior economic strategist, expects the companies that engineer AGI successfully will scale as much as fivefold in the near term.
“If you talk to these companies, they would all argue that we are, maybe, at worst five years away, or at best three years away from AGI,” he said. And with that potential, “American exceptionalism has to become even stronger.”
While he acknowledges not every firm in the so-called Magnificent Seven will accomplish this, “maybe three or four will.”