Looking at the performance of US stocks and bonds since Monday, analysts at Macquarie Research believe that no one is worried about the possibility of a slowdown in US GDP growth.
However, they believe there is now growing concern about slowing corporate earnings growth among the top-performing technology companies.
“Despite all the attention paid to generative AI in the past nine months, Meta's failure to meet its revenue growth expectations in the first quarter raises questions about whether monetizing this technology is as easy as traders have been led to believe by management,” Macquarie said in a statement. His note was issued ahead of the GDP data earlier today.
“The risk to the broader stock market is whether doubts about corporate revenue growth turn into doubts about the transformative power of the alleged AI revolution for productivity,” the analysts add.
According to Macquarie, this is worrying, because the prospects for high-technology-driven productivity growth have driven belief in long-term deceleration of inflation and long-term growth.
“Without this faith,” he says, “we will only have negative supply-side structural trends to look forward to as well — climate change, resource-consuming decarbonization efforts, deglobalization, conflicts, etc. All of these trends are inflationary, and depress productivity.” . a company.