Back Research Notes The AGI Race: The Defining Macro Force of Our Time is Here Published on August 3, 2025 By Jordi Visser In this week’s video — The AGI Race: The Defining Macro Force of Our Time is Here — I explore the growing divergence between legacy economic data and the accelerating AI economy. The S&P pulled back to start August after a strong run as the underlying weakness in jobs, PMI miss, and tariffs caused investors to reassess risk. But beneath the surface, it’s clear we are no longer operating in a traditional macro regime. Payrolls are only being held up by health care, and outside of that, the job market is essentially flat or negative. The labor market isn’t collapsing, it’s just not seeing hiring. This isn’t about layoffs. It’s about a structural shortage of labor and the beginning of a capital-intensive, AI-driven transition. The second half of the video dives into recent earnings commentary around the AI industrial boom: from cloud infrastructure outpacing supply to power shortages stalling capex. The AI Action Plan is positioning the U.S. on war footing to scale compute, energy, and hardware. The implications are massive, recursive learning, self-writing code, and autonomous agents are beginning to arrive. The market doesn’t fully grasp how fast things are moving, but the recent earnings beats by Meta and Microsoft are a signal. This is no longer just about Nvidia. This is about the AI adoption and industrial transformation required to support the AGI age. Timestamps: (00:00) – August begins with a market pullback after 3 strong months • Speculative tech and rate-sensitive trades lead the move down (01:23) – Spec basket (quantum, crypto, retail) shows early weakness • 20-day moving average broken for the first time since the 1980s (02:47) – Long-term dollar weakness tied to AI democratization • Other nations may benefit as hardware rollout scales globally (04:15) – Payroll revisions are worst since COVID • Ex-healthcare, job creation is near zero or negative (06:01) – Hiring slowdown, not firing spike • Demographic shifts and immigration declines now dragging payroll growth (08:01) – Tariff headlines hit legacy firms like Ford and Whirlpool • Tech megacaps are the real macro drivers with $18B in revenue beats (09:17) – AI cloud demand outpacing infrastructure • AI agents and recursive learning now driving enterprise adoption (12:19) – Utilities and suppliers like Schneider fully booked to 2030 • Power constraints becoming a critical bottleneck (23:30) – Trump’s AI Action Plan marks a full industrial pivot • Executive order–driven, deregulated, and guaranteed for 3.5 years (31:55) – Recursive learning = exponential acceleration • AGI writing and improving its own code marks intelligence explosion (36:10) – Crypto and stablecoins are no longer fringe • Central banks and policymakers are now paying attention Watch here: The AGI Race: The Defining Macro Force of Our Time is Here