Latest Investments & Planning Insights

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?