At the Plan B Forum in Lugano, Switzerland, scheduled for October 23 and 24, financial journalist Silvia Berzoni will share a stage with Paolo Ardoino of Tether for a fireside chat on the intersection of technology and finance. The event draws Bitcoin, blockchain, financial freedom, and AI experts from across the globe.
In a press conference previewing the summit, Berzoni outlined the two themes she plans to address in Lugano: the U.S. midterm elections and the technology surge driven by artificial intelligence. Her remarks, first reported by Corriere del Ticino, paint a picture of an America racing ahead on tech while leaving much of its population economically stranded.
Who Is Silvia Berzoni?
Silvia Berzoni has covered global finance professionally for more than 15 years. Since 2025, she has served as Editor in Chief for Tech and Finance at Chora Media, one of Italy’s leading multimedia news groups and an early pioneer of the podcast format. Berzoni hosts Morning Finance, a daily video podcast that reaches a peak audience of around 34,000 listeners, covering macroeconomics and monetary policy.
On Saturday, October 24, she will be the featured guest at a fireside chat at the Plan B Forum, the informal conversation format the summit uses for high-profile speakers. The session will explore where technology and finance genuinely converge, and where they collide.
Finance Through Berzoni’s Lens
“Explaining finance means giving it back its human dimension. Behind markets there are people, power dynamics, expectations, and fears. Finance can seem abstract, but its consequences are concrete: a crisis at the Strait of Hormuz shows up on your energy bill; a semiconductor export restriction changes a company’s investment plans. Today, national security, the economy, and technology are inseparable. What matters is the price of energy and who controls its supply, the cost of a chip and who can buy it. Journalism’s job is to reconstruct these connections, separate signal from noise, and explain who pays and who benefits from the decisions being made.”
The pairing of economy and technology is not accidental. The world’s largest share of investment flows today is directed at the technology sector, a point Ardoino is likely to reinforce during his exchange with Berzoni. Stopping the capital accumulation now underway in tech appears nearly impossible, even as prominent economists warn about systemic risks from this convergence.
Trump’s Bet on Technology
“The United States today is wrestling with the dual nature of artificial intelligence: a force that is both socially and economically divisive. Americans hold a visceral distrust toward what Trump calls ‘super intelligence,’ yet this remains the largest economic wager the country has ever placed. According to industry projections, it amounts to 10.4 trillion dollars in investment through 2032, roughly 3.6% of U.S. GDP every year, surpassing the historic outlays on bridges, railways, and electrification combined.”
“This is one of the largest mobilizations of private capital in recent history. Data centers, semiconductors, electrical infrastructure, networks, and computing capacity are redrawing the geography of American investment and dominance. Technology is driving economic growth, but the outcomes feel recessionary to a large share of the American population.”
“The middle class is shrinking and losing economic weight, while the wealthiest 1% holds one-third of household wealth. Gasoline prices are at their highest since 2022, diesel is near a historic peak, thirty-year mortgage rates have climbed to 7.6%, and both rents and food costs continue to rise.”
The contradiction is sharp. The same technology promising a better future, with automation that could assist us in almost every task, is actively worsening living conditions right now. Three questions follow naturally:
- When will the massive investment flows generate returns sufficient to justify their scale?
- Who will absorb the continuously rising costs of research and development in the meantime?
- How many of the projected benefits will actually reach ordinary families and citizens?
Will the Midterms Change Anything?
“The midterms will determine how much political room Trump has in the final two years of his second term. A Republican hold, which looks unlikely, would favor continuity on fiscal and deregulation policy. A Democratic House would bring more oversight, legislative friction, and investigations into AI companies and their leaders. A divided Congress, though, would not neutralize the presidency.”
Trump governs primarily through executive orders, which form the backbone of his political agenda. The president has repeatedly stated he has no intention of slowing the technology sector’s development, citing civilian and military advantages and the strategic edge it gives the U.S. over an increasingly assertive China.
As long as the earnings of technology companies keep rising, the AI race will remain expensive, and likely more so as the underlying technology grows more sophisticated. There is no obvious ceiling in sight, and capital allocation shows no sign of reversing.
Trump is a seasoned deal-maker, and return on investment is his primary metric. Expecting him to focus on narrowing the inequality gap that the technology boom is widening seems optimistic at best. His attention stays on growing an asset class that delivers gains, not on redistributing them. The question European observers at the Plan B Forum in Lugano will want answered is whether any political actor in Washington is willing to make that trade-off, and on what timeline.
