Hey there, listeners. I hope you all had a relaxing and restful holiday season. For our first show of

26, I'm excited to share that we have my colleague Martin Wolf back on. He's the F.T.'s chief

economics commentator, and he's joining me on the show to help me and you understand what to expect in 2026. To do that,

we're going to talk about some of the biggest economic stories of 2025 and what Martin expects

to see in the coming year in areas ranging from AI to trade policy. I should say, Martin and I had this conversation before U.S. forces captured Venezuelan

leader Nicholas Maduro, an event that we'll be covering closely here at the F.T.

I'm Nikella Tendera, and this is behind the money.

Thank you. I'm Nikola Tendera, and this is behind the money. Hi, Martin. Welcome back to the show.

It's a pleasure to be with you.

Glad to have you. Let's start off with possibly the topic of 2025, artificial intelligence.

It's been the all-encompassing story of the past, you know, say, 24 months,

if not more. All of the excitement and hype around AI has been driving up the stock market, and it's led lots of people to ask the question, are we in a bubble? Martin, where are these

fears that a bubble has formed coming from?

Well, I suppose, as usual, they come from what have been extraordinary rises in the values of a relatively limited number of mega stocks, led, I suppose, by NVIDIA, which have increased in value just enormously.

I believe it's now the world's first $5 trillion company.

So the question then is, is that supported by the genuine prospects of the businesses,

or is it mostly hype? And that's an absolutely standard

question when there are enormous changes in valuations based on hopes for the future, which

haven't yet been realized. That, unfortunately, is something we've seen many times in the past,

starting with the railroads in the 19th century, the dot-com

bubbles, another famous example, that the expectations of profits from new technologies, which

are themselves genuinely exciting, there's no doubt the railroads were real and the internet

...