It’s not inflation or recession that has blindsided traditional macroeconomists, but irrelevance. Artificial intelligence has not just transformed markets but made our dominant frameworks for understanding them obsolete.

For over a century, macroeconomics has relied on tools honed in the industrial age: GDP to measure growth, yield curves to signal recessions, and productivity metrics built around physical goods. But we now live in an economy increasingly defined by the immaterial: algorithms, platforms, synthetic data, and code.