by Pádraic Gilligan, Co-founder, SoolNua

At this stage, most of the usual trend and forecast reports for the business events industry have landed. Reading through them, you can’t help noticing the strange unanimity: a pervasive, untroubled optimism.

True, many acknowledge the challenges of rising costs and inflation, and the pressure on clients to deliver more with limited resources. But these concerns are mentioned in passing. The main message is one of progress and recovery, as if the hard Covid years are behind us and the future assured.

Yet when we drill down into regional sentiment, the glow fades a little. US respondents are Pollyanna-positive, radiating confidence about 2026 and beyond. The mood in APAC, EMEA and LATAM, however, is more subdued—cautious, even weary in Europe.

Still, because the global business events industry remains so dependent on the US as both a source market and a bellwether, American optimism inevitably spills outward. If the US is booming, so are we. That’s the logic.

Maybe Michel Chevalier’s 175-year-old observation still applies: “When America sneezes, the world catches cold.”

But that raises a question I can’t quite shake: how healthy is America, really?

At first glance, the narrative is simple and movie-lie. “Bad actors” were running the country; the world was “ripping America off.” Now, the “good guys” are back in charge, and the republic is once again the world’s moral and economic compass. Cue soft lighting, swelling strings, and a closing shot of Main Street reborn.

But when you look past the political screenplay, the story gets murkier.

A lot of the current optimism comes from the AI investment boom. The surge in tech valuations has added an estimated five trillion dollars to US investor wealth this year alone. But that wealth is highly concentrated—clustered among a tiny constellation of giant tech firms, each interlocked with the others through mutual investments, data dependencies, and board-level overlaps.

It’s a fragile ecosystem: dazzling on the surface, not so underneath.

Isabelle Mateos y Lago, Chief Economist at BNP Paribas, put it neatly: “On the surface the economy looks resilient … but underneath there’s still a lot to worry about.”

Another analyst described it as a “two-speed economy” where wealthy households are buoyed by stock market gains while lower-income families struggle with high prices and slow wage growth.

These are not re-assuring words.

For our own industry, these divisions matter more than we might admit. The top 10% of US earners now account for roughly half of all national consumption. That’s the same cohort driving first-class and business-class demand, luxury hotels, and destination incentives. Delta Airlines expects revenue from premium cabins to exceed economy class by 2026.

That statistic—gleaming as it is—should give us pause. It tells us not just who’s travelling, but who isn’t.

It also highlights the risk of mistaking a narrow boom for a broad recovery. If the health of our global industry is tethered to a handful of mega-wealthy corporations and the lifestyles of their senior executives, then we’re not standing on solid ground.

The Financial Times has been quietly questioning America’s apparent soft landing. Beneath the confident stock market stories, its writers describe a more fragile reality: household debt on the rise, company borrowing costs increasing, productivity growth uneven. Much of the current optimism may be built on future promises, not present results.

I’m not predicting a crash. But I do wonder whether we’ve become too eager to believe in the story of American exceptionalism—too quick to let Silicon Valley valuations set the mood for global travel, meetings, and incentives.

Every industry, of course, needs hope. Ours especially. We trade in optimism, in the belief that face-to-face connection creates value, that travel expands minds, that good times will keep rolling. But hope untethered from realism can become delusion.

Sometimes I worry that, in questioning this narrative, I risk playing Cassandra—the figure from Greek myth cursed to see the future clearly but never be believed. She warned the Trojans not to wheel that wooden horse inside the walls. They smiled politely, called her dramatic, and carried on celebrating.

Maybe the American economy is as strong as it looks. Maybe AI will lift productivity and secure another decade of growth. Maybe the meetings and incentives market will continue to flourish.

But maybe not.

For now, the prudent stance might be one of watchful curiosity rather than blind faith.

The American boom could well be a mirage built on inflated valuations and the consumption patterns of the ultra-wealthy.

Or it could be the foundation of a new cycle of innovation and prosperity.

Either way, it seems wise for those of us in the global business events sector to temper our exuberance with perspective. Because if America catches a chill, we may all feel it soon after.