Welcome to Markets Desk, your midday read on the stories moving money and markets.
Jeremy Grantham is sounding the alarm again, and this time he's calling the current U.S. stock market the most expensive in American history. The veteran investor points directly at AI-driven valuations as the engine behind the excess, a warning that carries weight given his track record of calling prior bubbles before they burst.
That skepticism finds company in Steve Eisman, the Big Short legend who says investors are chasing the wrong names in the AI trade. Eisman's sharpest example is SpaceX, a private company with revenues roughly comparable to the maker of Froot Loops, yet being valued by some at one hundred times those revenues. His message is simple: the story is compelling, but the prices are untethered from reality.
Meanwhile, Satya Nadella is pushing in the opposite direction, urging every company to build its own AI model rather than depend on a handful of dominant platforms. Nadella framed it as both a competitive imperative and an economic risk management strategy, warning that concentrating AI capability in too few hands could distort entire industries.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
