This week’s Edge will look at the calls for big rate cuts given today’s inflation backdrop and how tariffs could impact economic growth.

With all the excitement in the equity market these days – Solid Q2 earnings! Silly stocks! AI mania! – it’s easy for bonds to get lost in the shuffle. The wild interest rate swings in the opening years of this decade have given way to a long period of elevated but stable yields, which has important implications for how we design bond portfolios.

The Fed, investors, and corporate America are holding their breath — waiting to see if AI can keep the economy from slipping.

Enter “silly stocks”. The past several weeks have featured meteoric rises in the stock prices of many companies with little to no hope of developing a sustained business model but are, for whatever reason, attractive to investors looking for a laugh or a thrill. To take one example, OpenDoor, a non-profitable online home purchase company, saw its stock increase by as much as 500% before it began to lose some air. More broadly, Goldman Sachs Research has identified a noticeable uptick in speculative investor behavior, eclipsed only by the bubbles that formed in the late 1990s and briefly in 2021.

This simple display of the yields of the various maturities of Treasury bonds, ranging from shortest to longest, was once lauded as a reliable recession indicator but is now somewhat derided as a false prophet of doom.

Hiring is slowing. Home prices are dipping. Real consumer spending is negative. And yet, markets are at all-time highs. Why aren’t investors more concerned, and what could change that?

Before this week, the Federal Reserve had not released updated economic and interest rate forecasts since March 19th. That sure feels like a long time ago. While members of the central bank’s monetary policy committee (FOMC) speak publicly all the time, we finally received an update on Wednesday to their collective thinking about how the U.S. economy is performing and what measures might be needed to help keep it in balance.

A sudden spike in geopolitical tensions shakes markets out of their calm streak. In this week’s Weekly Edge, Cameron Dawson analyzes the ripple effects across oil, equities, currencies, bonds, and what investors should be watching for next.

Despite macro headwinds and cloudy corporate guidance, Q1 earnings delivered a fundamental spark, helping equity markets recover from April lows. We break down the numbers, explore what’s driving investor optimism, and examine why AI may be the next tailwind.