At Axios House D.C. in Washington, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the U.S. won't let Europe become "the arbiter" of regulating American tech companies. That’s the fight in plain sight: who gets to write the rules for the next industrial order, and who gets told to live with them.
The event, held 3 days ago and sponsored by Accenture and Ford, brought together policymakers and business leaders to talk about the next phase of America's economic growth. The cast was familiar enough. NYSE Group president Lynn Martin, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), Kalshi co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour, Commodity Futures Trading Commission chair Michael Selig, Zillow Group CEO Jeremy Wacksman, Northrop Grumman chair, CEO and president Kathy Warden, Southern Company chair, president and CEO Chris Womack, and others all took turns explaining how the system should keep moving.
Who Gets to Set the Rules
Greer’s line was blunt. The U.S. won’t let Europe become "the arbiter" of regulating American tech companies. That’s not a debate about abstract policy. It’s a contest over regulatory power, with corporate interests and state power locked together while ordinary people are left to absorb the consequences of whatever gets approved, blocked, or fast-tracked.
Selig said the CFTC will defend its authority over prediction markets "all the way up to the Supreme Court" if necessary. The language is pure institutional muscle. The agency claims the right to police the market, and it’s ready to drag that claim through the highest court in the land. Mansour, whose company sits inside that fight, said prediction markets are "here to stay" because many people feel traditional financial systems are "rigged against them." That’s the kind of sentence that lands because it names the grievance, even if the platform still lives inside the same financial machinery.
Meeks, meanwhile, said he was worried the Iran war will become this generation's "forever war," and he criticized President Trump for using "basically real estate negotiators" in diplomatic talks. On Trump's strategy, Meeks said: "I don't think that you're going to be able to bomb yourself out of this." The war machine keeps grinding, and the people making decisions keep talking as if the problem is only who’s sitting at the table.
Who Pays for the Industrial Future
Martin said AI's biggest economic opportunities will come from energy and infrastructure, predicting both sectors are positioned for "outsized returns for a longer period of time." That’s the promise sold from the top: more growth, more returns, more investment, while the costs of building and powering the whole apparatus fall somewhere below the boardroom.
Womack said U.S. energy demand is growing and the U.S. needs to commit to building 10 new nuclear plants to meet that demand. The scale is enormous. So is the authority behind it. A handful of executives and officials talk about what the country needs, and the rest are expected to accept the bill, the risk, and the long timelines.
Wacksman said the homebuying process has become so complicated that half of Americans cry at some point during the process, according to Zillow's 2022 study. That figure says plenty without needing embellishment. Housing, one of the basic needs of life, has been turned into a maze so punishing that even the process of trying to buy a home can break people down.
What the Sponsors Want Built
Ford Motor Company executive chair Bill Ford said most of America's critical minerals come from China. He said the U.S. has them, but it doesn't have the proper regulation to develop those minerals. Ford called for a bipartisan industrial policy to compete with China, saying: "Having a planning horizon that we can count on makes a huge difference, because our lead times are longer than political lead times." That’s the language of capital asking the state for stability, so the bosses can plan while everyone else waits for the next round of extraction and construction.
Ford also said flying cars are "very possible." It’s a neat little future for a sponsored stage in Washington. Meanwhile, the real present is a system where energy, housing, minerals, finance, and AI are all being discussed as assets to be managed by institutions that answer upward, not outward.
Ron Ash, Accenture Federal Services CEO, said the U.S. is in a prototyping bubble. "My biggest concern is that we win this race for developing the best AI technology and we lose the race to deploy it," he said. That’s the whole machine in one sentence: build fast, deploy faster, and make sure the public gets whatever comes out the other end.
The event’s roster said as much as the speeches did. Accenture and Ford sponsored the gathering. Axios hosted it. The people with the microphones were the same people with the leverage, and the conversations stayed safely inside the boundaries of what power is willing to consider.