Ep 42: The AI Gold Rush: Boom, Bubble, or Both?

Trillions are pouring into AI, but where does the real value live—and who gets left behind? 

We sit down with Chief Economist and EVP Research at Centurion Asset Management, Carl Gomez to unpack the economic engine behind the AI surge, from the debt and equity financing that fuels data centers to the market incentives forcing CEOs to overhaul their playbooks. 

The story goes far beyond gadgets and hype: AI spending is now a visible pillar of U.S. growth, reshaping capital flows, valuations, and how firms hire, train, and compete.

We dive into the market split where companies with credible AI strategies pull ahead while “old world” models face compression. Carl explains how automation is erasing classic entry-level tasks—building models, drafting memos, cleaning data—squeezing the on-ramp for young workers and widening the gap between those who can orchestrate AI and those unable to translate business needs into machine-executable steps. 

We explore whether this productivity is new value or a transfer from wages to capital, and what that means for labor market mobility, training, and pay.

Zooming out, we connect AI infrastructure to geopolitics: the U.S.–China tech race, chip supply chains, and the policy shockwaves from tariffs and trade realignments. 

We discuss why bond yields have reacted to shifting confidence in the dollar, why gold catches a bid when reserve-currency nerves flare, and how alliances and export controls shape who owns compute and where returns accrue. 

Through it all, one theme holds: communication, judgment, and trust still decide outcomes. The edge isn’t just code—it’s the human ability to frame problems, persuade stakeholders, and integrate tools into real workflows.

If you’re trying to understand where the opportunities hide, how risks stack up, and what skills matter most, this conversation offers a practical roadmap. 

Listen, share your take, and help others find the show—subscribe, leave a review, and tell a friend what stood out to you.

Quick heads up this episode was recorded on February 17, 2026 so while the news may have changed since this conversation was recorded the thoughts and ideas still remain relevant. 

Also everything we talk about in this episode is for educational purposes only and its not financial advice.

Transcript

Setting The AI Stakes

Julia Pennella, Host 0:00

Right now, the world is racing into the AI boom. Not billions, but trillions of dollars are pouring into chips, data centers, and the infrastructure powering artificial intelligence. But here's the question no one seems to be asking. Is this a real technological revolution? Or are we inflating the next big bubble? Welcome back to Let's Talk Politics, where policy meets real life and we make politics make sense. Now, I'll be honest, for the last two years, I've had a running theory that the global economy was being single-handedly held up by Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. And whatever magic the CEO at Nvidia has. If that's not the entire macro story, Carl Gomez is here to prove me wrong. Economist Carl Gomez is back for part three, and he's joining us to unpack what actually is happening beneath the AI hype. Because this story isn't just about technology, it's about capital, markets, and the future of work. We dig into how AI spending is impacting the bond market, how companies integrating AI are pulling ahead while others get left behind, and why entry-level jobs, the place where people used to learn by doing, are quietly disappearing. So what does that mean for youth employment? We also zoom out to the bigger picture: the US-China tech race, the scramble for chips, and how AI is reshaping everything from markets to geopolitics. If you're wondering where the real opportunities are, where the risks are hiding, and how to position yourself in an AI economy, this episode's for you. Quick heads up! This episode was recorded on February 17th, 2026. So while the news may have changed since this conversation was recorded, the thoughts and ideas still remain relevant. Also, everything we talk about in this episode is for educational purposes only, not financial advice. So with that, let's talk politics and the economics powering them. We've seen until recently AI growth was funded by cash reserves of big tech. Coming into 2026, we're seeing that shift towards some more debt-financed AI infrastructure. The big word that's also online is we're in this AI bubble, the big companies just circulating and buying within themselves. Where's the money? So I'm I'm want to ask you does this massive corporate borrowing create a crowding out effect in bond markets and effectively raising the cost of capital for the rest of the economy? And that is regardless of where the Federal Reserve or Bank of Canada is setting their overnight rate? Like what is happening that these big tech are just kind of funneling money through themselves at this point?

Market Bifurcation And Job Disruption

AI Investment And U.S. Growth

Carl Gomez, Chief Economist at Centurion Asset Management 2:51

Well, there is a lot of capital out there for AI. The catchword for AI is the promise of future. So both equity and debt markets are pouring money in there. Capital always font goes to the place where they think you can earn the highest return. So obviously AI has a lot of promises behind it. I'm not surprised that that's the case. There are always these fads, but from an equity standpoint, when I look at valuations of companies and tangible stuff, not to get too technical, but there was the dot-com boom back in the late 90s, early 2000s, which there was a bubble there and it burst. And there was a lot of money that flew into anything that had dot com on it. The difference today is when you look at the AI investment that's there, there is tangible actual business plans there. So there's not a lot of hot air just going into this. So from a technical standpoint, when you look at some of these valuations, just to those companies that are getting this stuff, there's a solid business that is there. There's a good chunk of the stock market where valuations are not all that frothy because that's not where the big surges are coming from. So there's a little bit of a bifurcation in the market towards AI-driven sort of stuff. And then the flip side, this has started to happen more recently, is the market looking at companies that are kind of old role companies, including some real estate stocks, and saying, well, AI is going to kill you. And AI is going to kill you because the model that's driven your business can easily be done by AI and make it render it a commodity. So there is this bifurcation that the market is starting to think do all the benefits of AI accrue right away? We don't know. We have no idea whether that's the case. But the promises that AI can provide is fundamentally transformational. And I think in some ways, any you and I, in my own job, you know, just having Chat GPT edit something I'm writing or put together a script or clean up a resume. I mean, those are just very superficial sorts of things. But to be able to draft up a legal document, to be able to do a pro forma and move the missing parts of things that an analyst would have done in their entry-level sort of job in my field in real estate, and spent all night doing when you could just do this as a touch of a button, those are transformational to the businesses themselves in how things get done. And I think that's the reality that we need to start grasping with is this technology has a lot of ability to transform what's happening in businesses and the way we do things and who's doing it. And one of the biggest factors that I'm seeing, and go back to the demographics, is unemployment rates are rising much higher for younger people today. The entry-level jobs that I was used to coming in, where you were just basically running numbers and things like that. You grew your strength from doing that. It was a stepping stone. A lot of companies today can say, I don't need a young analyst to do this. I can get AI to do it pretty quickly. So it's already crowding out some of the jobs that are there. Where does it lead long term? Who knows? But there's a lot AI can definitely do. And I think that's the existential adjustment that the market is trying to figure out too, which is why it's attracting a lot of capital. But like I said, there is tangible sorts of stuff that's being incorporated uh into business models with AI. And if you don't transform, and I you see this all the time. A lot of companies and CEOs during earnings calls are saying, How are you utilizing AI? And the analysts want to know because if you don't have a plan for this, your stocks get killed and the capital runs away. So that's becomes a very big part of the equation going forward. To your point about capital coming in, what's interesting about the United States economies in the last couple of quarters, economic growth would have been basically flat, like close to Canada is close to 0%. But right now, estimates are like 3%, 4% growth in the United States. The economy is not slowing down. But when you parse those numbers, it's all because of the investment dollars that are going into AI. And quite frankly, that's what we want to see in Canada. We should be investing in business investment and that stuff to grow our economy. We haven't. We need to compete in in that line. And we have smart people in Canada, educated people. There's a lot of room to harness the power of that and invest in that stuff.

Julia Pennella, Host 7:21

I am firmly of the belief that because of this AI boom originating from the US and the fact that the US is like, I guess, the gold standard for the market, right? Everyone trades in US dollars, more or less. I'm wondering if that is how the US has not completely collapsed at this point. Because between the political rhetoric that's happening and other countries letting it happen, because it's the trading dollar, right? Because we're also getting chips from Taiwan.

Dollar, Tariffs, And Flight To Gold

Carl Gomez, Chief Economist at Centurion Asset Management 7:50

It's not just ADA, but it was not just US, it's China too, and you know, Asia and stuff as well. To the point, the US dollar has been the reserve currency of the global economy. And part of that was the old institutions that basically dominated things. But the way trade worked, it was basically the US had a massive trade deficit, but it had a massive capital surplus, which is why it was that reserve currency. Everybody was willing to hold the US dollar because it financed the global economy to it to that extent. And the trade deficit in the US just basically reflected that. What I think the new world order, and Donald Trump got stalked in his tracks by this with Liberation Day and the tariffs, is like, look, you know, the rest of the world's been willing to finance all of this sort of stuff. But if you're going to go up and tariff it and basically try and reduce the way things work, there's going to be a runaway from the US dollar. And that's why bond yields shot up right after Liberation Day and money flew out of US treasuries. And I think we're kind of in that environment right now. The problem is where do you diversify into if the US dollar is the reserve currency of the fiat market that's there? Basically, the only value there is the implicit value that the world places in it. And I don't want to be in the US dollar anymore. Where do I go? The euro is not the reserve currency, the yon is not the reserve currency. And so what's interesting is money has flown into gold recently. And the worry is that the US dollar gets debased. I'm going to go into something that has value, which is gold. And that's been a gold surge. So I think there's a bit of a reflection in that story because of that whole thing. The AI story to me is a race between who's going to develop faster and be able to get the new world going, China or the United States. And so I think there's an economic war underlying all of this that that's going into this sort of stuff. But of course, when you look at companies like Apple and stuff like that, you can see you're an American company, but a lot of their manufacturing and resources are integrated through the Chinese economy as well. So there is still a lot of integration that goes on underneath this surface. But I think global economy-wise, diversification out of US dollars is something that Mark Carney talked about. The institutions are changing. And so financial markets are changing in terms of where uh they want to be.

Julia Pennella, Host 10:16

Yeah. And seeing the federal government move forward with different trade agreements and expanding that into Asia, bringing in Europe as that partner and Canada being the orchestrator of that. I'm so proud to see this. I mean, we don't know how it's going to unfold, but I think we are optimistic.

China–U.S. Tech Race And Supply Chains

Carl Gomez, Chief Economist at Centurion Asset Management 10:32

Well, I think for you know, for just on that point, which I think is kind of uh almost funny in a sense that or ironic, because the whole point here is I think with Trump's tariffs and stuff, he wanted the US to be the center, make America great again, right? Like this was the whole thing. But in doing this and creating himself as an island, he's actually pushing more and more countries towards China, which has been the problem all along. So it's counterintuitive in some ways and backfired. And I think this comes back to Carney's speech, which I think is great. It's like, well, how do we figure this all out? There's going to be the US here and everybody else there, but pushing towards China when we should have been all together with the US and as we have been over the last 23 years. Now it's more politics, but it's kind of the consequence of the economics as well.

Julia Pennella, Host 11:26

My last question here, it's tying into your earlier response. Do you think with AI, we're gonna be seeing this like version of like a trickle-down economics in the sense of the fact that companies have to adapt to AI, like you mentioned? How are companies automating or again getting rid of those entry-level jobs? And this is a thing we can look at the job numbers. It's less of people necessarily being laid off, but more of not opening up those entry-level jobs. And there's predictions from different organizations that are projecting AI could add 13 trillion to global economy GDP in the next uh four years. So, from an economist's perspective, is this new value, or is it simply a massive transfer of wealth from labor and wages to capital and software owners?

Will AI Enrich Capital Over Labor

Carl Gomez, Chief Economist at Centurion Asset Management 12:15

Well, that's a good point. I mean, AI is a subset of a trend that has been happening again for the last 20, 30 years as the world and globalization has adjusted. We moved away in North America, the United States, a lot of high-cost jurisdictions that were labor intensive, but the labor costs went up because healthcare and standards and everything. We moved away from a manufacturing economy towards more of a services sort of economy. And in the United States, it has a surplus in services. And I think AI is just an extension of this sort of situation where how do we leverage on the service side the tools that are there? Does this cause a disparity? Yes, I think it actually contributes to it because one of the capital holders, the investors behind this stuff, are going to get rich in there. So they they get that. But I think from a labor market perspective, they're gonna be the haves and have-nots. The jobs are disrupted uh out because if you don't have the skills, you basically aren't gonna get the skill set that's there. But at the same token, the people who have the expertise to be able to manipulate the AI and all of that sort of stuff will be able to use that as a tool to enhance their job as well. So I think that's the risk that happens with this transformational technology. My daughter is 11 years old. And one of the things that I encourage her to do is actually use AI because in the world that she's gonna inherit, it's gonna be the ones, the masters who can control that, understand how to work it, utilize it as a tool that will be successful. So rather than looking at it as a scary sort of thing, is like, how do I able to utilize it in a way that I can manipulate it or be part of my workflow? And I think with companies, that's the big question right now is like, how am I integrating this into my business? Who are the people that are going to be the ones to be who use it? I had a conversation with my uh daughter's teacher about coding and why she recommends not doing coding anymore because there's no point. AI does the coding. What are you teaching your kid to do to compete with an AI to do this? But learning this other stuff. But I think these are all the big existential questions as this technology comes in. And look, the world has been this way forever. Economies, I mean, somebody who saw a car one day, but was used to buggies and whips are gonna say, Oh my God, I want to hold on to my buggy and whip. And meanwhile, the car is speeding ahead. It's the same story here. That adaptation to these big changes are just the key point to moving an economy forward.

Skills, Humanity, And Adaptation

Julia Pennella, Host 14:48

And uh, what's coming to mind for me is like the CEO of Nvidia also kind of said that same point like, stop coding, stop being engineers. We have AI for that. Go actually study the arts, study the humanities. And the big thing I'm seeing online is I think the biggest AI skill of 2026 is communication. Because yes, you can get that reputation of write a speech for me, but you still need that human instinct, that emotion. That's something AI, I don't think, is there yet. I think it will be in maybe 10 years, but you still need that human automation to actually make it sound human because you're just that same AI slop, right?

Carl Gomez, Chief Economist at Centurion Asset Management 15:24

To that point, like in my business is basically selling an investment product. Like the clients out there can just get an AI report and read something and then that they they do it. But to take it over the goalpost, you do need that assurance of a human talking to you and having the emotional touch point with all of that and being able to relate from a human level. I mean, I have no doubt at some point we can fix the AI technology into a robot to do that, but right now it's still not there yet. So the human touch point is big factor still underlying all of that. And so, to the point of doing arts and and humanities and stuff, that's all part of it, right? I mean, understanding the that part of the human code is still very important.

Julia Pennella, Host 16:09

I like that human code, very timely on that. We shouldn't be afraid of technology. There should be, I think, guardrails around, but like you can look at technological mancets of like the printing press and electricity, and like you said, cars, the radio. You know, there is so many things that people were freaked out at, and now it's gonna corrupt the youth and yada yada.

Carl Gomez, Chief Economist at Centurion Asset Management 16:29

I I think to stand back, you didn't from a historical standpoint, the human race as in general, it's like the eight billion people on this planet have never had it better ever in the history. And part of that is technology. So from the person who's living in sub-Saharan Africa to the person in New York on this tower. I mean, we as as humanity have benefited tremendously from the technology. Will it kill us one day? Well, that's for us to decide. But you know, that's what we've done. We've raised our living standards and ease of living and everything up with that technology. So you have to embrace it to that extent.

Wrap Up And Future Topics

Julia Pennella, Host 17:07

Yeah, absolutely. Well, this was a fantastic conversation, Carl. I really appreciate it. I have to have you back. There's so much more we didn't like touch on, but I do want to throw it to you. Is there anything you wanted to share with the listeners uh as a closing thought?

Carl Gomez, Chief Economist at Centurion Asset Management 17:22

No, I think we've covered a lot of stuff. I mean, we didn't actually even talk about the environment. Environmental is kind of like an interesting topic to get into as well at some point. So yeah.

Julia Pennella, Host 17:32

Okay. So we got you back for environment and for sure the impacts AI is having on the environment because that's some scary stuff we're starting to see. And I think we could even go into how consumers not seeing the outputs of things is why maybe cheap debt, globalization, all those things are so easily accessible for us. It all ties in and it all comes back to the economy. Well, that was Carl Gomez. He's the chief economist at Centurion Asset Management. And that's a wrap on this episode. Thanks for tuning in to my three-part conversation with economist Carl Gomez. We covered a lot from bond markets and the K-shaped economy to the Great Reset, Canada's housing market, AI, and plenty of economics in between. If you haven't already, go back and check out parts one and two of these conversations. And don't forget to like, subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with a friend. It really helps support the show. I'm your host, Julia Pinella. This is Let's Talk Politics, and stay tuned for the next episode with another special guest as we break down the politics shaping our world. I'll catch you there.