Earlier this week, I penned an obligatory nod to the new “bull market” in big-cap US tech.

The scare quotes are there to denote that not everyone is buying the notion that the Nasdaq 100’s best quarter in over a decade counts as a genuine bull market, even if some people surely are buying the Nasdaq 100 itself, and more specifically NVIDIA, Meta and a who’s who of “darlings” which fell out of favor last year during the Fed’s somewhat quixotic efforts to beat back inflation.

As the curtain closed on March, the Nasdaq 100 notched a quarterly gain of 20%, which ranked in the top-10 best quarters ever for the index.

The outperformance to the S&P is very notable — some 1300bps. That exceeded tech outperformance during the pandemic bonanza.

As Bloomberg aptly noted Friday, there are too many superlatives to bother listing, as is typically the case with large rallies and especially with big, cross-asset meltdowns. NVIDIA, for example, had its best quarter in two decades. You can thank the burgeoning AI bubble for that.

There’s obviously a lot of overlap between the Nasdaq 100 and the S&P, and indeed, FAAMG plus Tesla and Nvidia added back five percentage points worth of market cap dominance for the US benchmark over the course of the rally.

Although the Nasdaq 100’s market cap is still nowhere near the late-2021 peak, it has added nearly $2.5 trillion in value so far in 2023.

At the nosebleed highs seen just before the wheels started to come off early last year, big-tech’s market cap was $20 trillion in the US or, in GDP terms, 10 Russias. Around the same time, the total value of cryptocurrencies peaked at $3 trillion.

As you can see from the BofA chart above, we’re now dubbing these companies “Systemically Important Tech.” I suppose that means they’re candidates for bailouts should they ever run into trouble. Given America’s social media addiction and our frightening reliance on Google, voters would probably be more willing to throw taxpayer dollars at tech than Wall Street. But that’s a pretty low bar.