Late last week, I called the US economy a Potemkin village and not for the first time.

That derisive description’s been more or less accurate since the mid-1980s — so, since the Reagan Revolution and the onset of shareholder capitalism.

Now, with the advent of AI which threatens to do to white collar jobs what globalization did to blue collar employment, the US economy’s at risk of becoming almost solely dependent on the consumption habits of the wealthy, which are in turn a function of financial asset performance and specifically stock prices.

Indeed, the US macro story in 2025 revolved entirely around resilient consumption in the upper-half of the so-called “K,” a spending impulse which owed a lot to AI-driven gains in the stock market, all augmented by infrastructure investment for data centers to sate mega-cap tech companies’ demand for AI-related compute.

With that in mind, consider the figure below, from the latest edition of BofA’s “Longest Pictures” series, an annual effort to compile a visual history of the world.

As you can see, stocks now account for a third of overall US household financial assets. That’s a record and it’s not close.

What does that mean, exactly? What are the implications? Well, one takeaway is that the US stock market’s (far) too big to fail.

“Stocks drive wealth which drives spending and US government policy on stock prices has morphed in recent decades into ‘too big to fail,'” BofA’s Michael Hartnett wrote. “A bear market on Wall Street is the quickest route to a recession on Main Street, and thus policy eases quickly when a bear market is threatened.”

There’s some irony here, and I’ve touched on it before. Most everyday people don’t actually own a lot of stocks, so “Main Street” is something of a misnomer. Go to a grocery store — a regular one, not a Whole Foods — and ask random people whether decisions about what’s in their cart are influenced by their stock portfolios and you’ll get a lot of quizzical looks.

What’s happened, in broad strokes, is that the US economy’s evolved such that it’s dependent on conspicuous consumption, and that’s the purview of the well-off for whom the decision to buy a fifth pair of HOKAs — or trade in a two-year-old Toyota Highlander for credit towards a BMW X5 — may well turn on Mag7 performance.

“This has given rise to the K-shaped economy where the asset-rich drive consumer spending rather than the asset-poor,” Hartnett went on, adding that “the biggest threat to this equilibrium is an electoral shift toward socialism and away from capitalism.”

God forbid.