The Weekly Edge

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.

The latest twists in 2025’s economic policy soap opera came from a federal court this week striking down the bulk of U.S. tariffs…only for a higher court to put that ruling on hold less than 24 hours later. While we wait for the appeals process to play out and anticipate alternative tariff measures from the Trump administration, we will focus this week on the U.S.’s enduring source of economic strength, its consumers.

Global bond markets let out a primal scream this week that was reminiscent of a fully-“seen” millennial singing along to The Tortured Poets Department at max volume (IYKYK).

Can you make grown men and women (and equities) weep tears of joy by implementing the highest tariff rates since the 1930s Smoot-Hawley? The answer is yes, you can, as long as it is preceded by the threat of incredibly high, onerous tariffs.