Prices for memory chips are forecast to soar in 2026. but what just as bad/even worse it looks like chip customers are looking at serious supply shortages during the year.
Higher prices and supply shortages could be enough to put earnings at risk at some high multiple cloud and AI companies.
The latest Bank of America Global Fund Manager Survey has gone extremely bullish. The bank’s Bull & Bear Indicator has climbed to 9.4, a “hyper‑bull” reading that the bank sees as a contrarian sell signal and a warning to add hedges rather than increase risk.
Taiwanese semiconductor and tech companies, led by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM), the chip foundry critical to global AI supply chains, have committed at least $250 billion in investmentS to build and expand chip, energy, and AI production capacity in the U.S.
Sometimes we put economic datapoints into different series. And that makes its hard to create a unified picture of what’s going on in a country’s economy. I’d argue that’s the case with China right now. And the two economic data sets released on today, Monday, January 19. Put the two sets of figures together and China is facing an economic crisis.
I expect more volatility as forth quarter earnings season picks up speed. Next week, despite the short week created by Monday’s Martin Luther King holiday, 157 companies are scheduled to report earnings with highlights that include Netflix (NFLX) on Tuesday; and General Electric (GE),Procter & Gamble (PG), and Intel (INTC) on Thursday.
CEOs will sit down at their desks next week all across the U.S. economy and ask “What does this do to my costs and my supply chains.”And there won’t be any answers. This is the newest disruption to U.S. trade put forward by President Donald Trump. On Saturday President Trump announced that he would impose a new 10% tariff, effective February 1, on a bloc of European nations until they come to the negotiating table to sell Greenland. The targets include Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands and Finland.
If those nations do not relent, he added in his post, the rate will increase to 25% on June 1, “until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”
One of the reasons I’m starting my new Substack Economics for Investors is the deluge of questions I get about economics now on my JubakAM.com and JubakPicks.com websites. I’m going to answer your questions once a week on my new Substack Economics for Investors. Launching soon. Big picture questions about the direction of the economy and how economic system work.
Frankly, I’ve never heard this before. But apparently a lack of volatility in the Treasury market is an indicator of a potential sell off ahead. According to Bloomberg, the 10-year Treasury note’s yield is headed for a fifth straight week of minimal change, rivaling its longest stretch of inertia in the past two decades. Since 2006, the median weekly range for 10-year yields has been 16 basis points. For the past five weeks, it’s been less than 10 basis points, the longest comparable stretch since 2020. The trend–a result primarily of expected stability in U.S. monetary policy–is stoking anxiety among bond-market professionals because previous instances of constricted yield ranges have been followed by selloffs.
I already own Equinor in my Dividend and Jubak Picks portfolios. Today, January 16, I’m adding the shares to both my Volatility Portfolio.
Meta Platforms (META) unveiled three agreements last Friday to buy up to 6.6 GW of nuclear power by 2035 for its data centers. The deals do have an element that clearly meets my definition of new. Meta buy electricity from new small modular reactor (sMR) projects that nuclear developers Oklo (OKLO) and TerraPower are planning to build over the next decade. But the rest of the new deal is remarkably old.
JPMorgan Chase’s (JPM) investment-banking fees unexpectedly fell in the fourth quarter, missing the firm’s own guidance from just last month as revenue from both underwriting and advising on mergers declined.
PJM Interconnection, the biggest US grid operator, has dialed back its forecast for electricity demand growth. Maybe the data center boom will take longer to go from paper commitments to centers will customers than projections have assumed. PJM Interconnection, which manages the 13-state eastern grid from the mid-Atlantic to the Midwest, has cut its peak demand forecast for the summer of 2027 to 160 gigawatts. That’s down from a previous outlook of 164 gigawatts. Not a huge change in absolute numbers, but a significant change in direction.
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