Fall 2026 Seminar Series: Money and Finance Idea Lab, Columbia Center for Political Economy
Session 2: The AI Boom, Financial Markets, and Uncertainty
This session continues our Fall series on the political economy of liquidity by considering how the rapid development of artificial intelligence is reshaping the production and management of uncertainty across financial markets. The scale of investment required to build AI—from chips and data centers to energy and computing infrastructure—depends on expectations about future capabilities and returns that remain unusually difficult to assess. Yet those expectations are already directing enormous flows of capital–increasingly supported by debt–while competition among firms and states continues to create pressure to invest before the longer-term economic value of the technology is clear.
The webinar will explore how these financial commitments shape the development of AI itself, how markets make claims on an uncertain technological future which create potential contradictions and frictions in the financial system, and whether AI requires us to rethink some of the concepts through which we understand markets, information, and economic coordination. In doing so, it will examine how the resulting entanglements of investment, debt, technological competition, and new forms of economic and political agency may generate uncertainty across the wider financial system.
Speakers:
Henry Farrell, SNF Agora Professor of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
Maryam Farboodi, Associate Professor of Finance at Cornell SC Johnson School of Business
