The News
The gap in expectations between CEOs running retailers, industrial giants, and other “real economy” companies and Wall Street financiers has grown, according to Semafor Intelligence, a new report released Thursday based on an analysis of interviews with more than 300 executives, policymakers, and decision-makers at Semafor World Economy.
Markets continue to hit all-time highs despite the Iran war, as well as oil and other supply shocks. Main Street mostly remains sanguine, with corporate profits at record highs, AI investment growing, unemployment near historic lows, and the US emerging as a relative winner.
Major CEOs operating global businesses say they feel battle-tested enough to absorb almost anything. They’re excited about the promise of AI, even if details of its value remain hazy. But many of the Wall Street decision-makers who attended Semafor World Economy in April are sounding alarms. Their worry is that investors are treating this economic moment — physical supply disruptions, geopolitical fracturing, tariff whiplash — like the liquidity crises of the past, which were solvable with government cash. We are in a “Road Runner moment,” said Peter Orszag, CEO of Lazard, “where the impact of what’s happening is not yet manifest.”
Executives at April’s gathering mostly agreed that the US was somewhat insulated from the most extreme energy price volatility as a result of the conflict, but diverged on where the true cost of the disruption would fall. That’s according to the analysis, which used Semafor’s new proprietary AI tool to parse the full onstage record across five days and rank nearly 5,000 distinct claims from CEOs, lawmakers, central bank governors and finance ministers.
The tool then distilled the signals into nine evidence-backed themes and tied them back to each speaker, session, transcript, and video moment to reveal an economy defined by chokepoints:
- Industrial policy: The US government leans in
- Supply chains: Global trade, longer routes
- Energy independence: The US is uniquely insulated
- The Iran war: Markets underprice the fallout
- Energy demand: AI power is the new oil shock
- The AI race: US models lead — but China integrates faster
- AI and the workforce: Employers now own reskilling
- Private credit: Worries of $3 trillion contagion
- Public markets: Optimism on Main Street, market worries
See the full Semafor Intelligence report on the Chokepoint Economy here and the methodology of how we sent an AI bot to the Washington gathering here.
Know More
Leaders broadly agreed that the shale revolution has buffered American consumers from the worst of the current energy shock in ways Europe, Asia, and Africa cannot match. Ken Griffin, CEO of Citadel, said the US economy is “much more sheltered from the consequences of this energy shock” than peer economies, and Kevin Hassett, director of the US National Economic Council, pointed to the current scale of US oil production as the key differentiator from the 1970s.
There was striking consensus among financial and geopolitical leaders that investors are making a dangerous bet — that the conflict ends quickly and cleanly. “The market is discounting where we really are at its own peril,” said Amos Hochstein, former top energy and national security adviser to former President Joe Biden. Harvey Schwartz, CEO of the Carlyle Group, said geopolitical risk was “mispriced,” warning that complacency has set in because “we haven’t had a geopolitical event of severity in a long time.” Sadek Wahba, managing partner of I Squared Capital, added that the damage to Middle East energy infrastructure is extensive, and “will take years to rebuild” — triggering a fundamental reassessment of global supply and demand chains that markets have not yet absorbed.
It’s not just about markets, however. As many speakers at Semafor World Economy noted, the real bottleneck for the AI economy comes down to one thing: electrons. Unlike oil, electrons can’t be shipped in barrels across oceans. The US has to navigate regulatory hurdles, political opposition, and supply chain disruptions to increase its energy capacity, or the token economy will run into a brick wall.
Without energy capacity, the promise of AI will be realized more slowly. And while the US leads in many areas of AI — China is playing a different and potentially more dangerous game.
American frontier labs hold the lead on models, chips, and lithography — but the report finds near-unanimous conviction among leaders that this advantage is fragile. Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, was unequivocal: “Anyone that tells you that you can sell compute to China and it somehow doesn’t disadvantage you in the race is horribly wrong in a way that will damage this country.” Horacio Rozanski, CEO of Booz Allen Hamilton, identified the divergence in strategy as the real risk: While US labs race toward superintelligence, China is deploying AI to upgrade its vast manufacturing base — a path that may prove more durable. Phillip Buckendorf, CEO of Air Space Intelligence, warned that the US’ software advantage is real but not self-sustaining: “Just resting on our laurels is not going to be enough.”
Read the full Semafor Intelligence findings on prevailing views from Semafor World Economy 2026 here and the full methodology here.