Business

Stocks could pull off a feat not seen since the late-1990s boom

Published

5 months ago

July 29, 2025

The stock market has been on a hot streak lately, notching record high after record high, and some bulls on Wall Street think the party isn’t over.

That marks a stunning reversal from the panic that gripped investors in April, when President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs shocked the world. Stocks, Treasury bonds, and the dollar crashed. Markets started pricing in a recession, and analysts slashed their forecasts.

But Trump put his most aggressive tariff rates on hold, corporate earnings remained robust, consumers stayed resilient, and stocks rebounded. Even foreign investors jumped back into U.S. markets. Meanwhile, his administration has negotiated several trade deals, including one with the European Union on Sunday that removes the threat of a damaging trade war.

Now that the fog of war is lifting, upbeat forecasts that predated Liberation Day are back, meaning stocks could put up big numbers again—as if the tariff shock from a few months ago was all just a bad dream.

On Monday, Oppenheimer chief investment strategist John Stoltzfus hiked his S&P 500 price target for this year to 7,100 from 5,950, reinstating the outlook he initially made in December 2024.

“This year reminds us of the classic Charles Dickens quote, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,’” he said in his latest note. “Although much uncertainty and worry prevailed for some time both with trade policy and geopolitical events, and given the multitude of potential outcomes, we’d note that cooler heads prevailed — leading to positive outcomes at least for now.”

He cited progress on trade negotiations, strong corporate earnings, and the Federal Reserve’s deft handling of monetary policy, which cooled inflation without causing a recession.

If the S&P 500 hits 7,100 this year, it would represent a gain of about 21% for 2025, marking a third straight year with a surge of more than 20%. That hasn’t happened since the late 1990s, when the U.S. economy and the stock market boomed.

Also on Monday, Morgan Stanley equity strategist Michael Wilson said the S&P 500 could reach 7,200 by mid-2026, explaining that he is starting to lean closer to that more optimistic “bull case” scenario.

He cited strong earnings as well as AI adoption, the weak dollar, Trump’s tax cuts, pent-up demand, and expectations for Fed rate cuts in early 2026.

Another member of the 7,000 club is Chris Harvey, Wells Fargo Securities’ head of equity strategy, who has stuck by his S&P 500 forecast of 7,007 even during the trade war.

Last week, he reaffirmed it, predicting big tech companies will continue fueling the stock market’s rally despite Trump’s trade policies.

“What we’re seeing is the winners continue to win,” he told Bloomberg. “The uber-cap companies have the higher margins, are gaining more market share. There is a real secular trend in AI that will continue.”

And over the longer term, this decade still looks like it will be another “roaring 20s,” according to market veteran Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research.

On Monday, he backed his thesis, which he first posited in August 2020, as productivity advances, a wave of capital outlays, and the endurance of consumer spending will keep stocks buoyant.

“If the remainder of the decade continues to play out as the Roaring 2020s, we predict that the S&P 500 will start the next decade at 10,000,” Yardeni wrote in a note.

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Business

Fed chair race: Warsh overtakes Hassett as favorite to be nominated by Trump

Published

9 minutes ago

December 15, 2025

Jace Porter

Wall Street’s top parlor game took a sudden turn on Monday, when the prediction market Kalshi showed Kevin Warsh is now the frontrunner to be nominated as the next Federal Reserve chairman, overtaking Kevin Hassett.

Warsh, a former Fed governor, now has a 47% probability, up from 39% on Sunday and just 11% on Dec. 3. Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, has fallen to 41%, down from 51% on Sunday and 81% on Dec. 3.

A report from CNBC saying Hassett’s candidacy was running into pushback from people close to President Donald Trump seemed to put Warsh on top. The resistance stems from concerns Hassett is too close to Trump.

That followed Trump’s comment late Friday, when he told The Wall Street Journal Warsh was at the top of his list, though he added “the two Kevins are great.”

According to the Journal, Trump met Warsh on Wednesday at the White House and pressed him on whether he could be trusted to back rate cuts.

The report surprised Wall Street, which had overwhelming odds on Hassett as the favorite, lifting Warsh’s odds from the cellar.

But even prior to the Journal story, there have been rumblings in the finance world Hassett wasn’t their preferred choice to be Fed chair.

At a private conference for asset managers on Thursday, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon signaled support for Warsh and predicted Hassett was likelier to support Trump on more rate cuts, sources told the Financial Times.

And in a separate report earlier this month, the FT said bond investors shared their concerns about Hassett with the Treasury Department in November, saying they’re worried he would cut rates aggressively in order to please Trump.

Trump has said he will nominate a Fed chair in early 2026, with Jerome Powell’s term due to expire in May.

For his part, Hassett appeared to put some distance between himself and Trump during an appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday.

When asked if Trump’s voice would have equal weighting to the voting members on the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee, Hassett replied, “no, he would have no weight.”

“His opinion matters if it’s good, if it’s based on data,” he explained. “And then if you go to the committee and you say, ‘well the president made this argument, and that’s a really sound argument, I think. What do you think?’ If they reject it, then they’ll vote in a different way.”

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What happens to old AI chips? They’re still put to good use and don’t depreciate that fast

Published

40 minutes ago

December 15, 2025

Jace Porter

New AI chips seem to hit the market at a quicker pace as tech companies scramble to gain supremacy in the global arms race for computational power.

But that begs the question: What happens to all those older-generation chips?

The AI stock boom has lost a lot of momentum in recent weeks due, in part, to worries that so-called hyperscalers aren’t correctly accounting for the depreciation in the hoard of chips they’ve purchased to power chatbots.

Michael Burry—the investor of Big Short fame who famously predicted the 2008 housing collapse—sounded the alarm last month when he warned AI-era profits are built on “one of the most common frauds in the modern era,” namely stretching the depreciation schedule. He estimated Big Tech will understate depreciation by $176 billion between 2026 and 2028.

But according to a note last week from Alpine Macro, chip depreciation fears are overstated for three reasons.

First, analysts pointed out software advances that accompany next-generation chips can also level up older-generation processors. For example, software can improve the performance of Nvidia’s five-year-old A100 chip by two to three times compared to its initial version.

Second, Alpine said the need for older chips remains strong amid rising demand for inference, meaning when a chatbot responds to queries. In fact, inference demand will significantly outpace demand for AI training in the coming years.

“For inference, the latest hardware helps but is often not essential, so chip quantity can substitute for cutting-edge quality,” analysts wrote, adding Google is still running seven- to eight-year-old TPUs at full utilization.

Third, China continues to demonstrate “insatiable” demand for AI chips as its supply “lags the U.S. by several generations in quality and severalfold in quantity.” And even though Beijing has banned some U.S. chips, the black market will continue to serve China’s shortfalls.

Meanwhile, not all chips used in AI belong to hyperscalers. Even graphics processors contained in everyday gaming consoles could work.

A note last week from Yardeni Research pointed to “distributed AI,” which draws on unused chips in homes, crypto-mining servers, offices, universities, and data centers to act as global virtual networks.

While distributed AI can be slower than a cluster of chips housed in the same data center, its network architecture can be more resilient if a computer or a group of them fails, Yardeni added.

“Though we are unable to ascertain how many GPUs were being linked in this manner, Distributed AI is certainly an interesting area worth watching, particularly given that billions are being spent to build new, large data centers,” the note said.

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‘I had to take 60 meetings’: Jeff Bezos says ‘the hardest thing I’ve ever done’ was raising the first million dollars of seed capital for Amazon

Published

1 hour ago

December 15, 2025

Jace Porter

Today, Amazon’s market cap is hovering around $2.38 trillion, and founder Jeff Bezos is one of the world’s richest men, worth $236.1 billion. But three decades ago, in 1995, getting the first million dollars in seed capital for Amazon was more grueling than any challenge that would follow. One year ago, at New York’s Dealbook Summit, Bezos told Andrew Ross Sorkin those early fundraising efforts were an absolute slog, with dozens of meetings with angel investors—the vast majority of which were “hard-earned no’s.”

“I had to take 60 meetings,” Bezos said, in reference to the effort required to convince angel investors to sink tens of thousands of dollars into his company. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, basically.”

The structure was straightforward: Bezos said he offered 20% of Amazon for a $5 million valuation. He eventually got around 20 investors to each invest around $50,000. But out of those 60 meetings he took around that time, 40 investors said no—and those 40 “no’s” were particularly soul-crushing because before getting an answer, each back-and-forth required “multiple meetings” and substantial effort.

Bezos said he had a hard time convincing investors selling books over the internet was a good idea. “The first question was what’s the internet? Everybody wanted to know what the internet was,” Bezos recalled. Few investors had heard of the World Wide Web, let alone grasped its commercial potential.

That said, Bezos admitted brutal honesty with his potential investors may have played a role in getting so many rejections.

“I would always tell people I thought there was a 70% chance they would lose their investment,” he said. “In retrospect, I think that might have been a little naive. But I think it was true. In fact, if anything, I think I was giving myself better odds than the real odds.”

Bezos said getting those investors on board in the mid-90s was absolutely critical. “The whole enterprise could have been extinguished then,” he said.

You can watch Bezos’ full interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin below. He starts talking about this interview gauntlet for seed capital around the 33-minute mark.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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