Wei Li says US technology stocks trade on the same earnings multiple as US stocks outside technology, and that is why she will not call the AI trade a bubble.
The bubble case usually rests on valuation. Li's argument is that valuation is the one part that is not stretched, because the companies are still delivering the earnings that support it, and that the risk sits instead in stories running ahead of revenue.
"It cannot be that the progress and pricing are perfectly in sync."
Li is BlackRock's global chief investment strategist. She started on the fixed-income trading floor at Lehman Brothers, moved to the equity floor at Citigroup, and now manages the firm's chief investment strategists in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
I listened to the full interview so you can skip it. 32 minutes of audio, 15 minutes of reading.
Here are the 16 takeaways that matter.
👤 Guest: Wei Li, global chief investment strategist at BlackRock, who runs the firm's team of chief investment strategists across Europe, Asia and the Middle East
🎙️ Host: Joe Cass, senior director at S&P Global Ratings, who presents the Leaders podcast
📰 Published: 1 September 2026 on the show's own feed; 31 August 2026 on YouTube
🔴 YouTube | 🟢 Spotify | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | ⏱️ 32 min | ✅ Time saved: 17 min
Key Takeaways
US technology trades on the same earnings multiple as the rest of the US market Capital-spending commitments keep rising and the earnings keep arriving to support them
The AI build-out is the first of three phases, and the other two have not started
BlackRock is underweight the longest-dated US government bonds, and the call divides its clients Li prefers short and intermediate maturities, on the fiscal path and a rising risk premium
BlackRock's internal investment tool is called Asimov, and the firm now names it in public
US equities and US bonds together are about 90% of global benchmarks The next country, Japan or China, is close to 10%
Public balance sheets cannot fund the five transformations, so private markets have to US debt to GDP is twice its level before the global financial crisis
The career advice Li was given was to make yourself replaceable, and she has stopped giving it
1. Not a bubble, not yet
Cass opened with the question the episode is named for: is the AI boom a productivity revolution, or could it be a bubble? Li's answer was that it is both, and that the two are not in conflict.
The valuation case for a bubble does not hold, Li said, because US technology is not trading at a premium to everything else. "It's trading at the same multiple as US ex tech. Isn't that crazy?" Companies are raising capital-spending commitments and doubling down on their conviction in AI while, in her words, "still doing the heavy lifting in earnings delivery"
It can still become a bubble. "So right now I don't think it's a bubble, but could it get there? It's also possible, right?" Her mechanism is the story rather than the multiple: with any general-purpose technology, "narratives can get ahead of actual revenue creation and adoption" She said that arguably happened at some point last year, which is why the market repriced
Both answers are true at once, she said. "It can be both. You give it time, it gives you both."
Mispricing is normal in a transformative technology, and the alternative is the harder thing to defend. "I mean, that's actually a lot harder to defend, right?"
2. Still in the build-out phase
Cass picked up on the productivity claim. Li said the evidence exists in places but not at the level that would change an economy.
Case studies and individual sectors show gains; the broad economy does not yet. BlackRock has "yet to see meaningful progress" of the kind that would let economies grow out of their problems, she said
Li put AI on a three-stage path and said only the first stage is running. "The first phase is build-out, second phase is adoption, and the third phase is broader productivity gain." "We're still in massive build-out phase, right?"
She compared the change to previous industrial revolutions, which puts the timeline in decades. "Maybe things are happening faster this time, but we're still in the early days."
Anyone claiming to know where this lands in five or ten years is not justified in the claim, she said, whichever direction they are claiming
3. A polyfurcated world
Li has been trying to make a word catch on, and Cass supplied it before she could finish the sentence.
Her word for the present is polyfurcated. "It's a bit like bifurcated, but polyfurcated" The three forces she named behind it are AI, geopolitical fragmentation and the energy transition
The scenarios now on the table differ more from each other than at any point in her career, with very different consequences for the economy and for portfolios, and all of them plausible at once
Cass answered with a line from Howard Marks of Oaktree: "There are old investors, there are bold investors, but there are not many old, bold investors." Li called it "very fair, very wise."
She asked him to use the word in conversation so it spreads, and he agreed to try
4. Credibility beats content
Cass set this up with his own reporting. He had interviewed Kunal Shah at Goldman Sachs, who told him there is little value in a market wrap written by a large language model, because anyone can produce one.
Li said the incremental cost of producing content and insight is heading to zero or close to it, which is why she has spent time on what survives that. "So how do we stand out in a sea of insights and content?"
What survives, she said, is credibility. "And I think it has to come down to credibility, and it has to come down to your reputation and your brand as a company and also as individuals" The test is whether someone decides your work is "worth making time for" before they have read a word of it
"AI is raising the floor for many things", she said, so the question becomes where a person or a firm is the ceiling instead That requires an honest conversation about what you are not good at, and then concentrating on what is left
5. Asimov, and the other track
Asked whether BlackRock builds its own tools or plugs the large models into existing workflows, Li said both.
BlackRock's internal investment tool is called Asimov, and the firm's chief operating officer, Rob Goldstein, named it on an earnings call. That disclosure is why Li could discuss it. "So it's already out there, so I can talk about it." Investors at the firm use it, and she said BlackRock has built versions of it
She split the work into two tracks. "One is to kind of build, let's say, LLM that has your own secret sauce, and that is hard because we're talking about pushing the frontier." The second is redesigning processes around the tools everyone already has, used more intelligently "The first one is harder, but really necessary"
The easy gains are already taken, she said, and more can still be extracted as models improve and agents are built into the firm's processes
She expects the runway left in these tools to be shocking against what most people expect
6. The paper notebook
Li writes index levels into a paper notebook by hand every day, a habit she took from the first senior investor she worked with on the trading floor. "I have a paper notebook, and every day I note down index levels" Her reason is retention: what you write down you remember better than what you scroll past on a phone The list is mostly equity indices, plus credit spreads
The second thing she checks daily is whether broader financial conditions are loosening, because market narratives swing wildly and that measure does not
Oil is the third, and she watches what the market is pricing for later as well as the price now. "And these days, oil prices, not only the front end, but where markets are pricing by the end of this year and also by the end of next year is something that I wake up to every day."
7. The divisive Treasury call
Asked for a view most other investors would disagree with, Li named a position rather than a forecast.
BlackRock holds less in long-dated US government bonds than its benchmark implies, and Li said the call splits the clients she meets. "At this juncture, I think our underweight in long duration US government bonds is a little divisive at the moment."
The case against her position is the yield itself, which at some point looks attractive enough to buy
The case for it is fiscal. She pointed to the trajectory of US government borrowing, to investors demanding a bigger premium to hold Treasuries at all, and to the inflationary pressure created by a world shaped by supply constraints
Where she does want to own government bonds is the shorter and intermediate maturities. "This is why we're underweight long duration US Treasuries. We prefer the front and the belly of the curve rather than the long end of the curve."
She repeated that this one is unusual for how much argument it draws. "It's quite divisive."
8. Disagreeing at BlackRock
Disagreement inside BlackRock's investment committees is routine. "It happens a lot." She put it down to a platform carrying many different investment approaches, which she described as the point of having one
Her own contribution is to put facts and analysis in front of other people to react to, rather than to win the argument
Where consensus does not arrive, the job is to find the center of gravity of the views and understand why they differ. "Sometimes we can find consensus, and sometimes we cannot find consensus." "If there are good reasons to disagree, that is good."
9. Not just an American firm
Cass asked what people get wrong about BlackRock's influence on markets.
The misconception Li hears most is that BlackRock is an American firm and nothing else. It is American, founded and headquartered in the US, and also, she said, very local
She manages chief investment strategists based in individual countries and regions, and named European, Asian and Middle Eastern colleagues among them
What she draws from it is that clients deal with local people who frame a problem in local terms. "Yes, we're global, but we're also very local"
10. Out of the equity lens
Asked what changed how she sees markets, Li described the limits of her own training rather than a market event.
She started in fixed income at Lehman Brothers, moved to equities at Citigroup, and spent most of her trading-floor career in equities before joining BlackRock
The change came when a multi-asset job exposed her to swings in bonds and commodities, and she found that different asset classes carry their own built-in biases The industry joke she cited is that bond investors are wise and bearish while equity investors have to be optimists "These are said as jokes, but there is something true in those jokes too."
Her conclusion was to judge the market from inside several asset classes rather than the one she grew up in
11. Why private markets grow
Cass asked whether power is shifting from public markets to private ones. Li started from BlackRock's megaforces framing, which she said the firm began rolling out around the time she was last on the show, three or four years ago.
The five structural transformations she named are AI, an aging population, the low-carbon transition, geopolitical fragmentation and the future of finance
The financing they need is what breaks the arithmetic. "the numbers start to first add up in a staggering way, and then they start to not add up, right?"
Public balance sheets are the constraint. "Because if you look at the level of indebtedness in the public sector, you look at US debt to GDP ratio, it's now twice the level compared to pre-global financial crisis level." She said the same is true of almost every developed economy and of a growing number of emerging ones
So the private sector has to carry more of the financing, and within that, private markets more than public ones
Her caveat is selection. The money should go to managers with discipline, a track record and rigorous underwriting standards, she said, and "not just tourists in the sector"
12. The Middle East risk call
Cass asked whether Li has ever been the one on the other side of a BlackRock argument, and how she settled it.
"Oh, quite regularly." She said her role includes putting proposals forward for other people to shoot at
Her most recent example was cutting risk back to neutral during the latest Middle East conflict
The position she was arguing against was the standard one: buy the dip when something happens in geopolitics
What made this episode different, she said, was physical damage. Energy infrastructure being targeted points to disruption that takes a long time to recover from
BlackRock had gone into the period with a modest overweight in US equities, a position itself predicated on the firm's conviction in the AI transformation
What she persuaded senior investors to do was stop taking large directional positions and lean instead into themes the conflict accelerates
13. Credit in a super cycle
Cass asked how much credit signals such as an S&P rating matter when investors assess risk.
Li said credit quality matters more than usual because this cycle has run long enough to stop behaving like one. "We actually don't talk about it in cycle terms because this feels more of a super cycle, not your typical cycle."
The absence of a normal credit cycle is what makes her look for where the fragility is and where things could go wrong
A good handle on credit quality is critical at this point in the market, she said, and timely rating changes are something markets and investors welcome
14. What allocators fear
Cass asked what the world's largest pension funds, insurers and sovereign wealth funds are most worried about over six to twelve months.
The answer she hears everywhere is discipline, not any single risk. "I think the one challenge that I pick up from speaking to clients all over the world is how to be disciplined in a market that just whipsaws" The market reacts and overreacts to every headline, on the way up and on the way down, she said
It resolves into a portfolio-construction problem: whether the holdings being relied on to offset each other will still do that in this regime
The harder version is accepting that they will not. "Or how do we accept the fact that the old diversifiers wouldn't work and we're still comfortable with the level of risks that we're taking?"
15. Why US dominance holds
Asked whether US market dominance has peaked, Li said it is too early to say, and gave a reason rather than a view.
The driver she named is the depth of US capital markets, in equities and bonds, public and private. "I would say it's too early to say because the drivers of US exceptionalism they are still here."
A member of her team added the US share of the global equity benchmark to the US share of the global bond benchmark. "You add the two percentages together, it gets to ninety, something like that." The next country is Japan or China, and she said she was not sure which. "They are close to ten percent."
Her causal claim is that the depth of those markets is why innovation happens in the US, which she said gives it an edge during an AI transformation
Energy independence and the dominance of the dollar are the other two supports she named, and none of the three changes overnight
The polyfurcated answer applies here too. There are plausible paths in both directions, she said, and tangible steps that would take the world down either one
16. Advice for the AI era
The career advice Li was given early on was to make yourself replaceable, so that you could be considered for other jobs
She no longer gives it unqualified. "But now I think about that advice in the age of AI." Her revision is to replace what you do yourself, first, using the tools you have
Her second piece of advice is to stop optimizing for usefulness. "And then one more thing I will say is do not over-index on usefulness." She separated system knowledge, which can be codified and looks useful, from tacit and contextual knowledge "Maybe those are the things that are not gonna be easily replaced by AI."
She said the useless thing may turn out to be the useful one. "But also, you know, in a world that is changing this fast, what used to be useless may well end up being super useful."
Her closing line was about attention rather than technology. "So just don't lose the habit of reading in a world where attention span is getting shorter and shorter."
Bonus Insights
If the day were hers to shape, Li said she would spend more than half of it on analysis, on her teams and on markets, and would schedule external engagements around that. Her sequence is fixed: "get the content first and then think about how to get it out"
Cass put her tenure at BlackRock at just over 15 years. Asked what the firm is really like to work at, Li said it is a friendly place where relationships matter, and that working with people who are nice as well as smart is not to be taken for granted. Her own start was a whirlwind — the boss she joined under left the firm a month after she arrived
Cass said that when the two first spoke, three or three and a half years ago, Li had about 70,000 LinkedIn followers, and that his last check put her above 300,000. Both figures are his, offered as the setup to his final question rather than claimed by her
Li's bottom line is that today's multiples do not describe a bubble but tomorrow's stories might, and that the harder problem for investors is a range of possible futures too wide for any single playbook.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
BlackRock (Li's employer, where she runs global investment strategy and the country and regional chief investment strategists; underweight long-dated Treasuries, modestly overweight US equities going into the Middle East conflict)
Asimov (BlackRock's internal investment tool, which Li said chief operating officer Rob Goldstein named on an earnings call, and which the firm's investors use)
Lehman Brothers and Citigroup (Where Li worked before BlackRock — the fixed-income trading floor, then the equity floor)
Oaktree Capital Management (Howard Marks' firm; Cass quoted Marks' line about old investors, bold investors and how few are both)
Goldman Sachs (Cass's earlier interview with Kunal Shah there supplied the argument that a market wrap written by a language model is commoditized)
S&P Global Ratings (The show's publisher; Li was asked how much credit ratings matter and said timely rating changes are welcomed by markets)
Books & Resources Mentioned
BlackRock's mega forces framing (The five structural transformations Li named — AI, aging populations, the low-carbon transition, geopolitical fragmentation and the future of finance — which she said the firm began rolling out around her last appearance on this show)
Goldman Sachs: From Intern To International Co-CEO (Cass's earlier Leaders interview with Kunal Shah, whose view on commoditized market wraps he put to Li)
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