The Economist has a really interesting July 24 story and relevant articles about AI and its effect on (main macro) economics:
The economics of superintelligence | If Silicon Valley’s predictions are even close to being accurate, expect unprecedented upheaval
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/07/24/the-economics-of-superintelligence
(The cover is very adorable, click the above link and check it out)
The article says, it is believed that superintelligence that outwits (at least average) humanity AI would soon emerge. And the article did a really refreshing thought experiment:
You don’t need to go to that extreme to conjure up AI’s mind-boggling effects. Consider, as a thought experiment, just the incremental step to human-level intelligence. In labour markets the cost of using computing power for a task would limit the wages for carrying it out: why pay a worker more than the digital competition? Yet the shrinking number of superstars whose skills were not automatable and could directly complement AI would enjoy enormous returns. The only people doing better than them, in all likelihood, would be the owners of AI-relevant capital, which would be gobbling up a rising share of economic output.
Everyone else would have to adapt to gaps in AI’s abilities and to the spending of the new rich. Wherever there was a bottleneck in automation and labour supply, wages could rise rapidly. Such effects, known as “cost disease”, could be so strong as to limit the explosion of measured gdp, even as the economy changed utterly.
Wait, though. There’s more,
The new patterns of abundance and shortage would be reflected in prices. Anything AI could help produce—goods from fully automated factories, say, or digital entertainment—would see its value collapse. If you fear losing your job to AI, you can at least look forward to lots of such things. Wherever humans were still needed, cost disease might bite. Knowledge workers who switched to manual work might find they could afford less child care or fewer restaurant meals than today. And humans might end up competing with AIs for land and energy.
This economic disruption would be reflected in financial markets. There could be wild swings between stocks as it became clear which companies were winning and losing winner-takes-all contests. There would be a rapacious desire to invest, both to generate more AI power and in order for the stock of infrastructure and factories to keep pace with economic growth. At the same time, the desire to save for the future could collapse, as people—and especially the rich, who do the most saving—anticipated vastly higher incomes.
Persuading people to give up capital for investment would therefore require much higher interest rates—high enough, perhaps, to make long-duration asset prices fall, despite explosive growth. Scholars disagree, but in some models interest rates rise one-for-one or more with growth. In an explosive scenario that would mean having to refinance debts at 20-30%. Even debtors whose incomes were rising fast could suffer; those whose incomes were not hitched to runaway growth would be pummelled. Countries that were unable or unwilling to exploit the AI boom could face capital flight. There could also be macroeconomic instability anywhere, because inflation could take off as people binged on their anticipated fortunes and central banks did not raise rates fast enough.