Wall Street's euphoria responds to Donald Trump's policies

The S&P 500 Index repeatedly reached its highest level ever in June of this year, surpassing the 8,000 basis point barrier over the same period.

The June 25 Financial Times headlined "Euphoria on Wall Street"; and Bloomberg reports that S&P 500 companies are now worth 3.3 times their total sales .

This happened while Donald Trump announced the same day that he had reached a trade agreement with three countries at the same time: Japan, Indonesia, and the Philippines, the latter two with the modality of zero-tariff (0%) access for US exports to their domestic markets.

The European Union (EU) is one of the most protectionist and closed economies in the world, and as a result, it has a $238 billion trade surplus with the U.S. Now, Trump is proposing to enter the European automotive and agricultural markets with zero tariffs, which would halve this phenomenal trade gap within three to five years.

Barclays warns that its Asset Euphoria Index has doubled in the first six months of the year and could triple by the end of 2025.

For its part, Nvidia – with a market value of US$4 billion – and Meta/Facebook have increased their assets by more than 100 points since April, when Trump launched his tariff offensive against 140 countries around the world.

The U.S. has created more than 800,000 jobs in the first six months of the year, with unemployment at 4.1% , synonymous with "full employment," and an annual inflation rate of 2.7% in June.

The key to what's happening in the US today is a phenomenal "investment boom," with investment from the tax cuts imposed by the 2025 Budget alone reaching $6.5 trillion. This is what's driving S&P 500 company profits to more than 80% above all forecasts.

The "Trump phenomenon" is a new kind of episode in international politics; and "to think about the new, we must first think anew," in Nietzsche's terms.

In this sense, the first thing to note is that all the innovations Trump has made in national and international politics and economics come from the supply side; and at this point, it should be noted that the majority of the massive investments currently being made in the US are aimed at fully deploying basic AI infrastructure (servers, data centers, networks).

For example, the Big 4 high-tech companies – Amazon, Microsoft, Meta/Facebook, and Google – are currently investing more than $260 billion in computing power generation equipment, while high-tech startups in the many Silicon Valleys that exist in American society will spend more than $100 billion on a similar goal.

This is the material basis of the overwhelming power of the United States in today's world and what allows us to affirm that Donald Trump's exceptionally charismatic leadership has structural roots.

This extraordinary innovative set operates on the premise that the world's productive systems will be transformed by artificial intelligence in the next 10 years.

The truth is always evident: what Trump is doing through his policy of extremely high tariffs is forcing the largest countries in the global system, such as Japan and the EU, to open their economies to the superior productivity of the United States and thereby accelerate the process of integration of 21st-century capitalism.

Donald Trump's number one economic agenda item is the typically American belief that investment is more important than trade; and now he wants to sweep it away with the onslaught of artificial intelligence.

"American protectionism" is today the exact opposite of what the commonplace claims. Donald Trump's drastic and high tariffs are the instrument for integrating global capitalism into the unrestricted service of American hegemony. It is Chesterton's "world turned upside down," and this, like all paradoxes, is its profound truth.

American civilization—futuristic but anti-utopian—combines everything in the present tense, and the result is this: Artificial Intelligence has unleashed a phenomenal boom in innovation in the United States, representing between 4 and 6 percentage points of GDP, according to Goldman Sachs. This implies an additional 1% increase in productivity per year, requiring more than $200 billion in investment over that period. This, in brief, is the largest investment relative to GDP in the history of capitalism since the First Industrial Revolution (1780/1840).

“American exceptionalism” escapes the categories of optimism or pessimism. In any case, the United States is “…the country in the world where the future arrives first,” in the enduring words of Alexis de Tocqueville.

That is why Raymond Aron insisted that the fundamental requirement for understanding American reality is an attitude of profound admiration.