💥 AI Winners, Our Silent Debt Crisis, and What's Next.
Economists issued a massive warning, household debt is surging, and the market is splitting in two. Here's what to do.
In 1969, Warren Buffett did something almost nobody in finance has the discipline to do. He quit while he was winning. After crushing the market for more than a decade, he closed his investment partnership and returned his investors’ money, explaining that prices had gotten so high he couldn’t find anything worth buying. People thought he’d lost his edge. Then the market collapsed in 1973 and 1974, falling roughly 50%, and Buffett came back and bought the bargains that made him the Buffett everyone knows today.
The lesson from 1969 is that the smartest money rarely rings a bell at the top. It just quietly steps back.
This year, the quiet stepping back is measurable.
Corporate insiders sold $77.6 billion of their own companies’ stock in six months, an 11-to-1 ratio of selling to buying and the fastest pace in about 20 years. At the same time, everyday investors bought a record $1 trillion of ETFs, and the Fear & Greed Index dropped to 37. The people who see their companies’ numbers first are stepping back, the crowd is stepping in, and in my 20+ years in finance, I learned to always ask which one knows something.
And the market is only half of what I need to show you this week, because the economy underneath it is splitting in two. On one side, the AI boom is minting fortunes. Memory chip stocks are up as much as 500% in a year, six giant tech companies (including Nvidia, SpaceX, and Amazon) sold $244 billion of bonds to fund the buildout, and a record 33% of American household wealth now sits with people 70 and older.
The other side is quieter, and it’s compounding. Household debt just hit a record $18.8 trillion, roughly 74% of new credit card debt is paying for groceries and emergencies at 20% interest, 49% of young adults live with their parents, and 69% of people told asset manager Schroders that retirement is out of reach for their entire generation. The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment reading sits at 44.8, matching the lowest level ever recorded. Stocks near record highs, and the worst consumer mood in history, at the same time. Both numbers are true because they’re measuring two different Americas.
I’m never telling you to quit the market like Buffett did in 1969 (he’d tell you himself that time in the market beats timing the market for regular investors). I’m telling you to do what he actually did. Notice when prices run ahead of value, hold cash so you can act when others can’t, and let the crowd’s mood work for you instead of on you. This issue shows you how, with the data, the moves I’m making, and the traps I’d avoid.
In this issue, you’ll learn about America’s $18.8 trillion debt problem, the AI warning signed by 16 Nobel Prize winners, this earnings season’s winners and losers, and why I’m buying CrowdStrike $CRWD.
📬 Here’s what’s in today’s issue:
Part I — Big Picture (What You Need To Know)
(1) Market & Economy Breakdown
(2) 5 Things You Need To Learn
Part II — What The Market Is Telling Us
(3) Market Psychology, Signals, and What’s Next
(4) Interest Rates & Real Estate
Part III — Investment Research & Analysis
(5) Insider Trading Alerts
(6) My Stock Picks & Research
(7) The Smartest Trades I See Right Now
Part IV — Financial Playbook (What To Do Right Now)
(8) A Valuable Lesson (People Learn Too Late in Life)
(9) My Tips & Advice
(10) You Asked, I Answered
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Part I: Big Picture (What You Need To Know)
(1) Market & Economy Breakdown (And What It Means For You)
What happened, why it matters, and what’s next.
Markets
Beijing-based startup Moonshot released Kimi K3, an open AI model it says rivals the best American models at half the price or less. The Nasdaq had its biggest dip of the week on the news.
Chip stocks are close to a bear market. The PHLX Semiconductor Index is down 19% from its June peak, and Micron closed below a $1 trillion market value for the first time in six weeks (it has lost $407 billion since June 25, more than Qualcomm and Marvell are worth combined).
The Nasdaq-100 has swung 1% or more in 20 of the last 26 trading sessions. That level of daily movement matches what we saw during the dot-com bust.
Corporate insiders sold $77.6 billion of their own companies’ shares in the first half of 2026 (per EPFR), an 11-to-1 ratio of selling to buying and the fastest pace in about 20 years.
Even good news is getting ignored. TSMC reported a 77% jump in profits and pledged another $100 billion of US investment, and the stock barely moved. Big AI spending used to push stocks up. Now it makes investors nervous.
SpaceX $SPCX fell to $125, down 41% from its June high, and closed below its $135 IPO price after aborting a Starship launch. The company has erased over $1 trillion in value in a month.
Economy
US public debt topped 100% of GDP for the first time since World War II. Debt held by the public reached $31.7 trillion by mid-July, and the CBO projects 120% of GDP by 2036 without changes.
The job market is cooling. June added only 57,000 jobs, and the entry-level job market is the weakest in 37 years, with 13.3% of new workforce entrants unable to find work.
Consumer sentiment sits near record lows even after a two-month bounce. The University of Michigan reading of 44.8 matches the lowest level ever recorded, and the people hurting most (lower-income households, non-college workers, non-stockholders) reported the steepest drops.
Personal Finance
Household debt hit a record $18.8 trillion, and credit card debt hit a record $1.28 trillion. Here’s the part that matters. About 74% of new card debt came from emergencies and basic bills (groceries, utilities), and the average balance carrier owes $7,886 at roughly 20% interest.
The wealth divide is widening. A record 33% of US household wealth is now held by Americans 70 and older, 49% of young adults live at home (up from 37% in 2019, per the WSJ).
Housing
Pending home sales fell 5.4% in June (per the NAR), 55% of homes are now selling below their list price (per Redfin), and mortgage rates rose to 6.55%, the highest since August 2025.
What This Means for You:
In my 20+ years in finance, I learned that markets rarely give you one clean warning. They give you a dozen small ones, and most people ignore all twelve.
Look at what this week actually showed us. The people with the best information (corporate insiders) sold $77.6 billion of their own stock, an 11-to-1 ratio of selling to buying. The people with the least information (retail investors) bought ETFs at the fastest pace in history. When the sellers know the companies and the buyers know the ticker symbols, I pay attention to the sellers.
I warned you about SpaceX weeks ago, when the stock was riding pure hype after its IPO. If you listened, you avoided a 41% drop. The lesson is worth repeating because it applies far beyond one stock. The IPO worked because only about 5% of shares were available to trade. Small supply plus huge demand equals an inflated price. Next month, the lockup expires and the supply of tradable shares could roughly quadruple. Basic economics tells you what usually happens when supply quadruples and demand stays the same. Never buy an IPO before its first lockup expiration. You’re paying a price set by artificial scarcity.
The same momentum that carried tech up is now carrying it down. The Nasdaq-100 has swung 1% or more in 20 of the last 26 sessions, and TSMC grew profits 77% and got ignored. When markets stop rewarding good news, the crowd’s mood has changed, and mood moves prices faster than earnings do.
Underneath the market, the economy is splitting in two. Stock gains are funding superyachts at the top (every $1 of portfolio gains adds about 5 cents of spending), while at the bottom, 74% of new credit card debt is paying for groceries and emergencies at 20% interest. A record share of wealth sits with Americans over 70, while half of young adults live with their parents. The government is doing what households are doing, spending more than it earns, and its debt just passed 100% of GDP for the first time since World War II. Everyone, from the family kitchen table to the US Treasury, is borrowing to keep up appearances.
These pieces connect. Heavy government borrowing plus $244 billion in tech company bonds pushes yields up. Higher yields keep mortgage rates near 6.55%, which freezes the housing market, which keeps young families renting, which keeps them from building wealth, which widens the divide that has 69% of people believing retirement is impossible. One chain, top to bottom.
Here’s what to do with all of this info. Keep buying broad index funds like the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF $VOO on a schedule, because momentum swings punish people who chase and reward people who stay steady. Hold 3 to 6 months of cash so an emergency never lands on a 20% APR credit card (that single habit separates the two sides of this economy more than income does). And treat any stock priced on a small share float and a big promise, the way SpaceX was, as entertainment money only.
(2) 5 Things You Need To Learn
The biggest ideas & trends to pay attention to.
📬 Today we analyze:
1) Top Economists Issued a Massive AI Warning
2) 3 Economic Numbers That Tell Us Where We’re Headed
3) The K-Shaped Debt Crisis No One Is Talking About
4) AI Winners and Losers
5) The Market’s Biggest Winners Are Also Its Cheapest Stocks
But first — Which side of the economy do you feel like you're on?
The Top Economists Just Issued a Massive AI Warning
More than 200 prominent economists, including 16 Nobel Prize winners, signed a statement titled “We Must Act Now,” organized by Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson. The signers now number close to 2,000 and include people from the political left (Paul Krugman), the right (Niall Ferguson, Tyler Cowen), tech (Reid Hoffman, Eric Schmidt), and government (Jason Furman, Gita Gopinath, Gina Raimondo).
The statement itself is short. AI may become far more powerful within 10 years, could transform the economy more than the Industrial Revolution did but in a fraction of the time, and could displace jobs on a large scale while also lifting living standards. The signers want economists and policymakers to start building rules and institutions now, before the wave hits.
The fight over the statement is more revealing than the statement. Stanford’s John Cochrane pushed back hard, arguing that regulators who act before they understand a technology usually strangle it (he points to how regulation crushed nuclear power). MIT’s Daron Acemoglu, who signed, argues the current race toward artificial general intelligence is effectively an agenda for replacing human workers, so steering it must be a first priority.
Here’s why this matters for you. When people this smart, this credentialed, and this politically opposite all agree that something enormous is coming, the debate is no longer about whether AI changes the economy. The debate is about who gets protected when it does. Watch for taxes, job programs, and AI rules to become the biggest political fights of the next decade, and expect markets to swing on every one of them.
My advice is simple. Make yourself hard to replace (learn to work with AI tools now, while it’s still an advantage instead of a requirement), and make your portfolio benefit from the trend you can’t stop. Owning a broad index fund like $VOO means you own the AI winners automatically, whichever companies they turn out to be.
The 3 Economic Numbers That Tell Us Where We’re Headed
The Census Bureau reported that builders broke ground on homes at a 1.43 million annual rate in June, up 19% from May. Before you celebrate, most of that bounce came from apartment construction recovering after a terrible May. Permits (the paperwork builders file before future construction) fell 3%, which tells you builders don’t trust demand while mortgage rates stay near 6.55%. Housing starts measure what builders did last month. Permits measure what they plan to do next. And right now the plans are shrinking.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that import prices rose 0.3% in June even though fuel got cheaper. Prices on goods from China jumped almost a full percentage point, the largest monthly increase in more than 18 years. Cheap Chinese goods have quietly held down American inflation for decades. If that era is ending, the Federal Reserve’s inflation fight gets harder, and rate cuts get further away.
The University of Michigan reported that consumer sentiment climbed almost 10% for a second straight month, boosted by lower gas prices. Here’s the context that headline skips. The reading sits at 44.8, which matches the lowest level ever recorded in the survey’s history. A two-month bounce off the floor still leaves you on the floor. Survey director Joanne Hsu also warned the improvement may fade because most interviews happened before oil prices turned back up.
Together, the three numbers describe an economy that is functioning but fragile. Housing can’t restart while rates stay high, imported inflation is creeping back, and the consumer mood is bouncing between “record low” and “slightly above record low.” My advice is to plan your finances for a slow economy, keep your emergency fund full, and treat any big purchase that requires borrowing at today’s rates with extra caution.
The K-Shaped Debt Crisis No One Is Talking About
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that total US household debt reached a record $18.8 trillion, after growing $740 billion in a single year. That one year of new borrowing roughly equals the entire economy of the Netherlands.
The scariest numbers hide inside the credit card data. Card balances hit a record $1.28 trillion, and the average person carrying a balance owes $7,886 at an average interest rate around 20.7%. That means about $1,632 a year in interest alone, roughly $136 a month that buys nothing and pays down nothing. And people aren’t charging vacations. Per Bankrate’s survey data, 41% of card debt comes from emergencies and 33% from daily basics like groceries and utilities. Three-quarters of America’s card debt is survival debt.
Student loans show the same pattern. With pandemic protections gone and missed payments hitting credit reports again, 9.6% of student loan balances are now 90+ days late, the highest ever recorded. Car payments average $738 a month, and serious auto loan delinquencies (payments 90+ days late) sit at 5.2%, concentrated among borrowers with weak credit.
Here’s the pattern underneath it all. Higher-income households are borrowing for mortgages, meaning debt attached to an asset that grows. Lower-income households are borrowing at 20% interest to eat. Same country, same year, two completely different financial lives. The housing trap makes it worse. Millions of homeowners locked in 2.5% to 4% mortgages years ago and can’t afford to move at today’s 6.55%, which freezes supply, keeps prices high, and pushes more families into renting and card debt. It’s a loop.
One honest piece of context. The Fed’s debt service ratio shows households spend about 11.3% of after-tax income on debt payments, below the 13.2% peak before the 2008 crisis. In total, America can afford its debt. The problem is that “in total” hides the bottom 40%, whose burden is far heavier.
My advice depends on which side of this you’re on. If you carry card debt, attacking it is the single best investment available to you (paying off a 20% APR balance is a guaranteed 20% return, and no stock offers that). If you’re debt-free, your strong credit is becoming more valuable as everyone else’s weakens. Protect it, build your emergency fund, and keep investing.
AI’s Winners and Losers
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna wrote in a shareholder letter that clients are shifting their tech budgets toward servers, storage, and memory ahead of expected price increases, and that cybersecurity concerns distracted spending during the quarter. Those two sentences, released with early results, set off one of the wildest days of the year. IBM fell 25%, the worst day in the company’s history, and there’s now boardroom talk of splitting the company apart.
The same two sentences made other investors rich. SK Hynix rose 27%, Dell rose 7%, Sandisk rose 5%, and cybersecurity stocks moved up across the board. Money leaving IBM moved straight into the companies on the right side of that spending shift. Meanwhile software names like Adobe, ServiceNow, and Oracle had another rough day.
The equipment makers keep confirming the trend. Dutch chip-equipment giant ASML reported record orders and raised its sales guidance for the second time, and Aehr Test Systems rose 30% after its results. Right now the pattern is simple. If you sell the physical stuff AI is built from (chips, memory, servers, equipment), you win. If you sell software that AI might replace, you lose.
But the IBM reaction carries a warning for everyone. Krishna’s letter restated trends the whole market already knew, and it still erased a quarter of a 100-year-old company in six hours. When well-known information moves stocks 25% in a day, emotion is setting prices. Expect more days like this all earnings season, in both directions.
My advice is to never hold an oversized position in any single stock through its earnings report in this environment, no matter how confident you feel. Diversification isn’t exciting, but IBM shareholders just learned what concentration costs. And if you own the AI winners, remember the same crowd that moves a stock up 27% on two sentences can reverse it on two different sentences.
The Market’s Biggest Winners Are Also Its Cheapest Stocks
Bernstein Research analyst Mark Newman is highlighting something strange about this market. Memory chip stocks are the year’s biggest winners, and they’re priced like companies about to fail. SK Hynix rose over 500% in the past year, just raised $26.5 billion in its US listing, and trades at about 7 times earnings (meaning you pay $7 for every $1 of annual profit, while the average big US stock costs 3 to 4 times more). Sandisk and Micron, the two biggest first-half gainers among established S&P 500 names, sit in the cheapest 20% of the entire index.
The cheapness reflects history. Memory chips have always been a boom-and-bust business. Prices spike, everyone builds factories, supply floods the market, prices crash, and past busts have bankrupted companies and wiped out investors. Newman argues that today’s low prices are effectively predicting an imminent collapse in profits, and that the market has stopped believing memory earnings can last.
Here’s the bull case, and I find the demand side of it compelling. Past memory booms were capped by phone and PC makers, who couldn’t pay endlessly higher chip prices because shoppers wouldn’t pay endlessly higher device prices. AI data centers have no such ceiling right now. Memory is the foundation AI runs on. The chips powering AI can’t complete a single task without it, and the world currently can’t make enough of it. In my 20+ years investing, I’ve never seen buyers accept price increases the way data centers are accepting them today.
So you have a genuine fork in the road. If the skeptics are right, these stocks are cheap for good reason and the crash comes on schedule, like every cycle before. If the bulls are right, the market is badly mispricing the most important components of the AI age, and these stocks have room to run even after 500% gains. I’ve learned that believing “this time is different” is expensive, and occasionally correct.
Here’s how I’d handle it. If you want exposure, size the position small enough that a 50% drop wouldn’t change your life, take some profits on the way up, and never touch the leveraged ETFs launching around these names (those tools turn volatility into losses even when the stock goes sideways). Cheap and safe are different words for a reason.
What This Means for You
The economists’ warning, the earnings chaos, and the debt report are all describing the same force from different angles. Two hundred economists say AI will transform everything. Earnings season proves the market believes them, rewarding anything that builds AI (memory, servers, chip equipment) and punishing anything AI might replace (IBM, legacy software). And the memory stock debate shows even the winners aren’t trusted, priced at 7 times earnings because everyone remembers past busts.
Meanwhile the economic data shows the cost of all this landing on regular households. Import prices are creeping up, which keeps the Fed cautious, which keeps rates high, which freezes housing, which is one reason household debt hit $18.8 trillion with three-quarters of new card borrowing going to emergencies and groceries. The AI economy is minting fortunes at the top of the market while the bottom half of the country borrows at 20% to buy food. Consumer sentiment sitting at record lows while stocks sit near record highs is the same fact stated twice.
The pattern to remember is that transformation creates a divide before it creates broad wealth. Electricity, cars, and the internet all did this. The people who owned the transformation got rich early, and everyone else caught up slowly or fell behind. Your job is to be an owner, even a small one.
My advice runs in this order. First, kill any 20% interest debt, because no investment beats that guaranteed loss. Second, automate investing into a broad index fund like $VOO so you own the transformation without betting on which company wins it. Third, if you buy individual AI names, keep positions small and expect 25% single-day swings to keep happening all earnings season. That’s the market we’re in right now, and it’s normal.
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Part II: What the Market Is Telling Us
3. Market Psychology, Signals, and What’s Next
4. Interest Rate Forecast & Real Estate Outlook
(3) Market Psychology, Signals, and What’s Next
The psychology, signals, and data pointing to where the market goes next.
(learn all of the benefits here!)
(4) Interest Rate Forecast & Real Estate Outlook
What’s next for mortgages, housing, and your money.
Interest Rate Predictions
My prediction is that mortgage rates hold roughly steady near 6.5% in the weeks ahead, stuck in the same range they’ve occupied for months. Freddie Mac’s weekly survey just showed the 30-year fixed at 6.55%, up from 6.49% and the highest since August 2025.
Two giant forces are canceling each other out. Inflation is improving (June CPI cooled to 3.5% headline and 2.6% core, both better than expected), which should pull rates down. But the war in Iran keeps flaring, oil jumped from under $68 to about $79 a barrel, and Treasury yields climbed on renewed inflation worry, which pushes rates back up. Until one force wins, rates go nowhere. I don't expect the Fed under Chairman Kevin Warsh to cut until inflation's path is clearly settled, and the strong-enough job market gives him no urgency. If the Middle East calms and oil retreats, I'd expect rates to drift toward the low 6s later this year. If the conflict escalates, 7% is back on the table.
The Housing Market
The housing market keeps tilting toward buyers, slowly. Inventory has held above 1.1 million homes for four straight weeks, the longest streak since November 2019. The median list price is down 2.3% from a year ago and has sat below year-ago levels every week since mid-January. Price cuts crossed 100,000 listings for the first time in 2026, and 55% of homes are selling below their list price (per Redfin). Meanwhile pending sales fell 5.4% in June (per the NAR) because rates at 6.55% still choke affordability. Renting keeps getting relatively cheaper, with the median asking rent down for 35 straight months to $1,692. The Realtor.com midyear forecast expects home prices to rise just 1.2% this year, slower than inflation and wages, which means affordability improves quietly even without a rate drop. The freeze persists because millions of owners hold 2.5% to 4% mortgages and won't trade them for 6.55%, which strangles supply and keeps the whole market stuck.
For home buyers. My advice is to stop waiting for a dramatic rate drop that isn't coming soon and start negotiating, because 55% of sellers are already accepting below list. Get quotes from at least three lenders, ask sellers to buy down your rate instead of cutting price (a rate buydown often saves you more monthly), and budget at today's 6.55%, treating any future refinance as a bonus.
For sellers. Price honestly from day one. Over 100,000 listings just cut their price, and buyers can see your days on market. A home priced right in week one sells for more than a home that chases the market down for three months. Small concessions (covering closing costs, a rate buydown) close deals faster than price cuts of the same dollar amount.
For investors. The rent-versus-own math favors landlords holding, since 35 straight months of falling rents squeeze new deals, while frozen supply protects the value of properties you already own. I'd underwrite new purchases at today's rates with zero appreciation assumed, and I'd watch late 2026, when possible Fed cuts could unfreeze the lock-in effect and bring both supply and buyers back at once.
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Part III: Investment Research & Analysis
5. Insider Trading Alerts (Following the Smart Money)
6. My Stock Picks & Research
7. The Smartest Trades I See Right Now
(5) Insider Trading Alerts (Following the Smart Money)
The latest insider trades from politicans, billionaires, and CEO’s, worth paying attention to.
(learn about all of the benefits here!)
(6) My Stock Picks & Research
Stocks I believe have the strongest long-term growth potential, including what I’m buying now and what I’m watching for a better price. (With my research, ratings, and buying plan).
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(7) The Smartest Trades I See Right Now
Unusual options activity showing where the smart money is placing its biggest bets.
(learn about all the benefits here!)
Part IV: Financial Playbook (What To Right Do Now)
8. A Valuable Lesson (People Learn Too Late in Life)
9. My Tips & Advice
10. You Asked, I Answered
(8) A Valuable Lesson (People Learn Too Late)
Financial lessons most people learn too late in life.
Warren Buffett has repeated the same rule for fifty years. Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful. Most people can quote it. Almost nobody notices that right now, both halves apply at once, because this market has greed and fear living side by side. Individual investors are 44.9% bullish and buying record amounts of ETFs, insiders are selling their own stock at an 11-to-1 pace, and the Fear & Greed Index sits at 37. A split market, on top of a split economy, with a record $18.8 trillion of household debt underneath.
We know how this setup ends, because 1929 already showed us. The people who came through 1929 in one piece shared a single trait. They owed nothing. The crash wiped out the borrowers first (investors buying stocks with loans lost everything in days), and the decade of quiet farm debt that built up underneath the boom is what turned a market crash into a national depression. The survivors owned what they owned outright, kept cash, and got to spend the 1930s buying what everyone else was forced to sell.
A century later, the same pattern is forming again. Fear is creeping back, the economy is dividing, and the most expensive kind of debt (20% APR credit cards) is growing fastest while paying for groceries. Whatever the market does next, the math of who survives it hasn’t changed since 1929.
Debt decides who gets to hold on, and cash decides who gets to buy the bottom.
None of this tells you the exact day anything breaks, and I’m never pretending it does. History hands out patterns instead of dates, and the pattern says the same thing every cycle. The people who get hurt are the ones carrying expensive debt and chasing whatever just went up.
So here’s what I’d do, in order. Kill any credit card debt first, because paying off a 20% balance is a guaranteed 20% return and nothing in the market beats it. Build 3 to 6 months of cash so an emergency never lands on a card. Keep buying a broad index fund like $VOO on a schedule, through the fear and through the greed, because steady buyers win every decade of market history. And if you own the hot names, keep the positions small enough that a 25% single-day drop (which just happened to IBM, a 100-year-old company) changes nothing about your life.
You can’t control the market, the Fed, or the economy. You can control your debt, your savings, and your buying schedule. Those three choices decide whether the next few years make you richer or leave you further behind.
(9) My Tips & Advice
My goal is to help you make smarter decisions with money, investing, and life.
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(10) You Asked, I Answered
What paid subscribers are asking, and what you need to know too! (Send me your questions and I will answer them!)
Q: Is a recession coming?
The data says slowdown, without saying recession. Unemployment is a healthy 4.2% and GDP is growing 2%, but job growth slowed to 57,000 in June, the entry-level job market is the weakest in 37 years, and delinquencies are at their highest since 2017. Plan your money for a slow economy (full emergency fund, no new expensive debt), and you'll be fine in either outcome.
Q: Why is consumer sentiment at record lows while the stock market is near record highs?
The stock market reflects the financial experience of people who own stocks. The richest 10% of Americans own about 90% of all stocks. Consumer sentiment reflects the financial experience of everyone, including the half of Americans who own no stocks at all. These groups are living in different economies. Asset owners have seen their portfolios climb and their homes appreciate. Everyone else has seen rent, groceries, and insurance costs rise faster than their wages. The gap between the two experiences is now the widest on record, with the University of Michigan sentiment reading of 44.8 matching the lowest level ever. Both numbers are true. They just measure different groups of people.
Q: Is AI a bubble like the dot-com era?
Some parts of the AI trade look like a bubble. Stocks moving 25% in a day on restated information is a sign that emotion is setting prices. Memory chip stocks trading at 7 times earnings after 500% gains suggests the market doesn't trust the profits to last, yet is still chasing the stocks higher. The difference from 2000 is that today's AI leaders have real revenue, real profits, and real products. They can still fall 50% or more. The likely outcome is a painful reset that eventually recovers, instead of a total wipeout. Own the whole market through index funds and you capture the winners without betting on which company survives the volatility.
👋Final Words:
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