Artificial Intelligence

I’m writing this week from London, the start of a four-country tour of Europe to see clients. I typically don’t have a lot of free time while on these journeys, but I did sneak away on the weekend for an economics field trip.

AI-related borrowers have accounted for nearly a quarter of nonfinancial U.S. dollar (USD) supply year-to-date, yet spreads for non-AI issuers have not widened meaningfully. Instead, hyperscaler spreads have widened, suggesting the market is absorbing the AI supply shock at its source.

Retail investors buy corporate bond ETFs expecting steady coupons and ballast against stock market volatility. Traditionally, fixed-income portfolios were anchored by defensive issuers like banks, industrials and utilities.

In his latest insight, Richard Bernstein, Global Head of Macro & Customized Investing, examines why the Fed’s actions tend to lag the economic cycle, how deglobalization may limit its flexibility, and what a potentially longer period of tighter monetary policy could mean for investors.

As bond yields have risen, mortgage rates are again facing upward pressure, extending the U.S. housing market's post-pandemic affordability challenges. Beyond mortgage rates, trends in wage growth, taxes, and insurance costs also continue to shape the affordability outlook.

In the first quarter of this year, as the Strait of Hormuz closed and oil prices exploded, Berkshire Hathaway made a couple of moves that might have flown under people’s radars.It cut its stake in Chevron by roughly a third. Then it bought an airline.

Understanding why investor optimism wins over a full market cycle is one of the most underrated edges an investor can own, and it has almost nothing to do with waving pom-poms. 

The financial markets are navigating a storm. The Treasury yield sell-off intensified this week, pushing the 10-year Treasury yield up to an intraday high of 5.20%, its highest level since 2007.

Decided to go independent? Here's how to design your RIA's client model, exit plan, technology, and compliance foundation before you file paperwork or sign a custodian agreement.

The BlackRock Model Portfolio Solutions team made significant allocation shifts during the week ended September 24, 2026. The team recently managed over $300 billion and often causes shockwaves in the ETF industry.

The U.S. economy remains resilient despite headwinds including sticky inflation, trade instability and rising geopolitical tensions. State and local government tax revenues have followed suit and have posted solid growth, aided by robust equity market returns.

The S&P 500 has remained remarkably resilient in the face of mounting macro headwinds. Despite oil prices topping $100 per barrel, 10-year Treasury yields climbing above 5%, and a renewed shift toward tighter monetary policy, the index continues to hover near record levels.

Second-quarter earnings were strong, particularly in technology, but crowded ownership often determined whether good news was rewarded. The selloff in semiconductors arguably reflected crowded positioning and concerns surrounding the sustainability of the earnings boom. The net result: multiples compressed while earnings revisions held up.

Artificial intelligence (AI) leadership is no longer a developed-market monopoly. Emerging markets (EM) now have their own AI champions, and productivity gains may follow. For bond investors, we expect the implications to differ by country—driven by industry composition, capital intensity, digital infrastructure and speed to adoption.

In September 2024 and June 2025, I wrote memos that were critical of governments’ attempts to override the laws of economics, based on my conviction that trying to do so is likely to prove ineffective and potentially harmful.

This week, there are a few things that we need to pay attention to: the large move in interest rates and what it means (and more importantly, what it doesn’t mean!); and the constant barrage of doom and gloom on energy and AI. Let’s jump in.

I do not know whether quantum computing is in that kind of window right now. Nobody does, and I am suspicious of anyone who claims certainty in either direction. What I can say is that the pattern-matching is uncomfortably familiar.

Last week we looked at the Federal Reserve’s inflation problem. This week, let’s look at the other half of its mandate: maximum employment.

Since ChatGPT was first released in 2022, the artificial intelligence (AI) trade has dominated US equity markets. Gains have been driven by three interrelated forces: enthusiasm for artificial intelligence, growing concentration in the largest technology companies and strong price momentum.

This year has presented no shortage of challenges for investors. Geopolitical conflict, trade tensions, rising energy prices, shifting interest rate expectations and an increasingly active political backdrop have each taken turns dominating the headlines. Yet despite these obstacles, the economy has continued to expand, corporate profits have marched higher and markets have climbed one wall of worry after another.

The U.S. economy has traveled farther than most forecasters expected. Strong household spending, healthy labor markets and continued business investment have kept the expansion on course.

The rise in Treasury yields has prompted a familiar set of explanations. Some investors have pointed to government borrowing and persistent inflation, while others have focused on the possibility that artificial intelligence will lift economic growth and interest rates.

Investment bubbles are inherently dangerous beasts. Like a natural Ponzi scheme, an investment bubble needs to draw in ever larger amounts of capital to keep it going. Nothing attracts capital like apparent success, so an inflating bubble that is creating fortunes for those who got in early will inevitably draw in capital. Unfortunately, this means the amount of money lost when the bubble bursts can outstrip the gains created on its way up.

Looking ahead, markets are priced for additional hikes. And our base case is that the FOMC will likely deliver one or two more 25-bp rate hikes through this year and into early next. However, looking further out, anticipating appropriate Fed policy through a financial-conditions-targeting framework has its own limitations. Hence, a neutral rate anchor is still useful.

LPL Research analyzes S&P 500 margin expansion, assessing how much is structural versus cyclical and what that means for future earnings forecasts.

It’s really starting to feel like autumn now. August PPI, CPI, and Retail Sales are in the books, the September FOMC meeting is out of the way, and we can now look forward to Jobs Week on Wall Street. Football is in full swing, and earnings season begins before you know it, with Pepsi (PEP) posting results on Thursday, October 8, followed the next morning by Delta (DAL).

Global growth remains resilient but uneven. In the United States, expansion is supported by private demand, a stable labor market and AI investment, while Europe and Japan continue to show surprising strength despite ongoing risks.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are developing faster than investors anticipated just a few years ago, fueling a popular narrative that AI will trigger widespread job cuts. Yet there’s little evidence to back this view. Instead, we find that AI is changing hiring patterns, altering skill requirements and shifting the mix of work performed within firms.

While the AI trade absorbs nearly all available investor attention, owning energy covers our absolute risk while creating the risk budget to cover the AI relative risk more effectively.

Major US equity indices finished the week mixed. The NASDAQ gained 0.7 per cent while the Dow and S&P 500 slipped. The divergence reflected a tug-of-war between fears of slower AI development early in the week and a rebound in AI-linked shares by Friday.

The Federal Reserve delivered the 25-basis-point increase the markets had largely anticipated, but the overall message was somewhat more hawkish than expected. The decision was unanimous, and the new dot plot points to another rate increase this year. Four participants apparently see the possibility of raising rates at each remaining meeting, so there is clearly a meaningful hawkish contingent on the FOMC.

The week began with calls for a potential slowdown in AI spending amid growing safety concerns and included a midweek Fed rate hike for the first time since 2023. The S&P 500 finished slightly lower for the second week in a row despite continuing signs that economic growth is strong. Shorter-term bond yields pushed higher as investors priced in the potential for additional rate hikes, both in the U.S. and abroad.

Every runner has a natural pace: the speed that we maintain under optimal conditions like flat terrain, cool temperatures and a good night of sleep. Runners can train to speed up to meet a target time, or slow down for endurance.

This has been an incredible year in that Wall Street has spent all of it raising its earnings estimates, and the second-quarter season only accelerated the trend. Analysts began the year expecting S&P 500 earnings to grow about 15%.

Early this week, I was in Los Angeles at the All-In Summit along with about 4,000 others, including tech investors, money managers and entrepreneurs. The ticket wasn’t cheap, but it was well worth it.

A popular narrative for the rise in bond yields over the past few months is that the debt-funded AI capital expenditure cycle is crowding out the Treasury market. The crowding-out argument can appear compelling: AI companies are expected to continue to issue unprecedented amounts of debt at a time when Treasury supply remains elevated. Because both ultimately draw from the same pool of investor capital, yields must rise to clear the market.

As summer officially gives way to fall on September 22, it's not just the weather that's changing. The global monetary policy landscape is shifting as well. After spending much of the past two years focused on supporting growth, central banks have increasingly turned their attention back to inflation, especially with oil prices climbing back above $100 per barrel.

This week's Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) decision was largely in line with expectations. While many market participants and Federal Reserve (Fed) members anticipated another rate increase later this year, we remained in the camp that viewed the move as likely the last increase before the Fed adopted a wait-and-see approach, allowing geopolitical developments to stabilize and recent inflationary base effects related to the US-Iran war to fade.

The K-shaped economy is real, and it is old. What changed isn’t the shape of the economy; it’s just that the media found a narrative that gets lots of clicks and views, and we let headlines do our thinking for us.

Throughout this Indexing Redefined series, we explored how traditional market-capitalization indexing ties portfolio weights directly to stock prices, creating hidden concentration risks. Furthermore, we discussed how fundamental indexing offers a disciplined alternative by weighting companies according to their real-world economic footprint. In this final installment, we address the dilemma investors face in highly concentrated equity markets.

This month, our experts discuss how Federal Reserve tightening has historically affected the markets; whether European stocks might be worth a second look; and the news from the most recent Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting. We provide the supporting documentation for all claims summarized below in the linked articles.

Catherine LeGraw and B.J. Brannan of GMO's Asset Allocation team discussed the role of liquid alternative strategies in today's investment landscape. 

Silver has already demonstrated that it can make large moves in both directions, and volatility is likely to remain part of the picture. But after the recent correction, the technical setup is becoming considerably more constructive.

Pacing isn't pausing. Calls to "pace the frontier" mean slowing the release of powerful artificial intelligence (AI) models to test and control them better, not halting development or spending.

Janus Henderson Investors today announced two senior investment appointments that will further deepen the firm’s leadership across its global equities franchise.

The Federal Reserve (Fed) made something clear this week that markets had been reluctant to accept. Apparently, the easing cycle isn't paused, it's over for now.

Open any market commentary today and the conversation is dominated by giants. Mega-cap technology companies command outsized shares of major indexes, and the private markets tell a similar story, as we watch companies increasingly staying private well past the point where they once would have gone public.

Artificial intelligence is advancing at a stunning, and perhaps uncontrolled speed. Last week, Evan Hubinger, the Alignment Science Lead at the AI company Anthropic estimated a greater than 10% chance that AI could eliminate humanity within a decade. Jakub Pachocki, Chief Scientist at OpenAI, recently observed 'The core problem in AI research is that of alignment - getting the AI to ‘try to do the right thing’ by human standards…