Good morning and welcome to Markets Desk, your midday read on the stories moving money and markets.
Greg Abel is sitting atop a war chest that would make most sovereign funds blush — nearly four hundred billion dollars in cash at Berkshire Hathaway. Abel's deal-making instincts differ from Buffett's in meaningful ways, favoring operational depth over bold acquisitions, and markets are watching closely to see how that capital gets deployed.
Shifting to equities, the S&P five hundred is flashing a valuation pattern not seen in decades, with the Shiller price-to-earnings ratio at levels that historically precede significant market corrections. That doesn't mean a crash is imminent, but it does mean the margin for earnings disappointment is razor thin, and investors should be pricing that risk accordingly.
And on the infrastructure front, United States data centers now consume nearly forty percent of global data center electricity, driven almost entirely by artificial intelligence workloads. That surge is straining regional power grids and accelerating investment in generation capacity, transmission lines, and cooling technology — reshaping both utility stocks and the broader energy complex in real time.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
