Analysts at consulting firm Pantheon Macroeconomics estimate that the stock market’s enthusiasm for all things AI has added some $8.5 trillion to aggregate US household wealth since late 2022. They wrote:
“The S&P 500 returned about 70% between the start of ChatGPT mania around the end of 2022 to the end of Q2 2025, with roughly half of those returns generated by the ‘magnificent seven’ tech stocks, a very rough proxy for the stock market boost from AI euphoria.
We estimate that translates into a lift to household wealth held in stocks of about $8.5T.”
As my colleague Luke Kawa recently wrote, stock market wealth seems to be underpinning US consumer spending, especially among the richest Americans. Some of that spending may retrench if AI is indeed a bubble — as some have recently mooted — and eventually pops.