Weekly Research Briefing: Finger Licking Good

@KevRGordon: With headline inflation coming it at +3.8% y/y in April, that means real average hourly earnings growth (adjusted for CPI) slipped into negative territory for the first time since April 2023

@AugurInfinity: Producer prices unexpectedly surged in April, well above consensus estimates.

Now this is just a partial screengrab. The actual section is longer and not all of the respondents are complaining about hiring. Also, we don’t know the degree to which the quotes that NFIB spotlighted are perfectly representative of the world of small businesses. Nonetheless, it’s remarkable that this is what’s surfacing up now, and not, say, complaints about interest rates or taxes or regulations or whatever.

So just to zoom back out for a second, you have the inflation data and it’s warm, if not straight up hot. And the labor market is, at a minimum, not falling apart.

And so to this note, not only is the market not looking at rate cuts anytime soon, the direction of travel increasingly looks like higher rates. 2 year yields are higher than 3M yields, and the spread is at its widest since November 2022, when we were still in the throes of the worst inflation. Increasingly the market is looking at the possibility of hikes coming down the pike.

@edclissold: Fun stat. The one-year correlation among S&P 500 stocks is at its lowest level since March 2000. It's a stock market more than a market of stocks.

Through Thursday, the S&P 500 had returned 10% YTD in 2026, with TMT (the Information Technology and Communication Services sectors plus AMZN and TSLA) accounting for 85% of the return. The S&P 500 excluding TMT has returned just 3% YTD. NVDA, which accounts for 9% of S&P 500 market cap weight, has contributed 20% of the aggregate S&P 500 YTD return.

@bespokeinvest: The ratio of the Health Care sector $XLV to the S&P 500 $SPY has fallen to its lowest level since March 2000.

SpaceX is targeting a valuation ‌of roughly $1.75 trillion in its upcoming initial public offering, in what could be the biggest-ever stock market debut by a U.S. company on Wall Street.

The listing of Elon Musk-led SpaceX could easily dwarf many of the biggest U.S. IPOs on ⁠record, including those of Alibaba , Visa and Facebook, now Meta Platforms which analysts say reflects high growth expectations from the rocket and satellite company that it may struggle to meet.

“The compute that we procure is the lifeblood of our business. It is the most important thing in the company. It’s the canvas on which everything else gets built. The decisions we make on how much compute to buy are some of the most consequential and hardest decisions to make in the entire company. Think of it this way — if you buy too much compute, you go out of business. If you buy too little compute, you can’t serve your customers.” - Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao

@knowledge_vital: "When code is a commodity, design is the competitive edge—the craft, point of view, and human judgment that make a great product rise above the rest" (Figma Inc. conference call)

@TheTranscript_: $HST Host Hotels CEO: AI demand is benefiting both downtown San Francisco and airport-adjacent lodging assets: "Leasing activity and net absorption improved in early '26 driven by AI-related companies. And that is benefiting not only our properties in city center, but also the Hyatt Burlingame, which is out by the airport and the Santa Clara Marriott. So we couldn't be happier with what's happening in that market and look forward to continued growth going forward."

Shares in Detroit carmaker Ford surged more than a fifth over two days, the sharpest jump since 2020, on investor hopes that its new energy unit will profit from the US data centre boom.

Ford launched its new subsidiary, Ford Energy, on Monday as part of a pivot away from electric vehicles and towards providing battery storage capacity for Big Tech giants building AI data centres, deploying technology licensed from Chinese battery giant CATL.

The company’s stock jumped 13 per cent on Wednesday after Morgan Stanley analysts said its relationship with CATL gave Ford an “under-appreciated strategic competitive advantage for its energy storage business”, estimating it could generate a gross margin of 25 per cent and grow to be worth $10bn…

“When we come calling to large grid suppliers, energy companies, they’re really excited about Ford being in this business,” he said. “We’re a trusted company. They’ve been buying our vehicles for a long time, and we’ve done our homework on this business.”

We forecast meaningful growth in ESS (demand over the next five years, driven by three structural forces:

• The rapid growth of AI inference workloads is making power demand more volatile and peak heavy, increasing the need for ESS to perform peak-shaving and smooth sudden load spikes.
• ESS is increasingly being deployed as a practical mitigation to traditional power capacity constraints, including limited availability of gas turbines, grid congestion, and long interconnection timelines.
• Growing penetration of renewables which require storage to balance intermittency.

Putting these together, we forecast a 38% CAGR for US ESS deployments, reaching 279 GWh by 2030. This is supported by a 14% CAGR within traditional grid-linked, utility-scale storage, increasing to 110 GWh by 2030 (vs. 57 GWh in 2025), while the data center market has the potential to support another 169 GWh of annual deployments by 2030.

NextEra Energy has agreed to combine with rival Dominion Energy to create a $420bn power behemoth, in a deal that comes at a time of booming demand for electricity to power AI data centres.

The deal, the fourth largest of all time according to LSEG, would create a US utility giant with a customer base of more than 10mn homes and businesses stretching from Florida to Virginia.

NextEra said on Monday that it will pay the equivalent of almost $76 a share for Dominion as part of an all-stock deal that values the group’s equity at roughly $67bn, a 23 per cent premium to Friday’s closing price. That implies an enterprise value of almost $124bn, including $56.7bn in debt…

The tie-up will help NextEra extend its dominance from its home base of Florida, where its Florida Power & Light division serves roughly 6mn customers, into the Carolinas and Virginia, where Dominion has around 3.6mn customers.

Dominion is the main power supplier for “data centre alley” in northern Virginia, the heartland of the US AI infrastructure build-out that handles roughly two-thirds of global internet traffic.

The deal will redraw the US power grid just as technology giants like Microsoft, Amazon and Google owner Alphabet race to build data centre capacity to meet AI demand — and power suppliers spend tens of billions of dollars in a rush to boost capacity.

U.S. food ingredients maker Ingredion (INGR) is in talks with British rival Tate & Lyle (TATE) over a possible takeover of the London-listed firm in a 2.74 billion pound ($3.7 billion) deal, the British company said on Thursday, sending its shares 55% higher.

A deal between Tate & Lyle, known for its artificial sweeteners used in Coca-Cola drinks, and Ingredion, could create ⁠a food and beverage ingredients giant worth more than $10 billion, at a time when consumers are increasingly opting for low-calorie drinks and diets…

Tate & Lyle has faced declining revenue and profit amid weak U.S. bakery demand, lower European pricing and rising costs, while Ingredion has seen softer demand for its legacy starches and sweeteners as consumers shift toward healthier and plant-based options.

A big drop in enrollment at the University of Vermont is causing financial concerns, with undergraduate enrollment down 7% and the incoming first-year students for next fall projected to come up 15% short of last year…

“UVM experienced a significant enrollment decline this fall,” UVM President Marlene Tromp told state lawmakers Wednesday. “It is becoming -- because of the caliber of school that we compete with -- it’s becoming more difficult for us to compete.”

She points to the nationwide trend of declining demographics and, due to new federal policies, fewer international students. And since there are fewer, the ones applying to UVM are now getting accepted into schools they wouldn’t get into before. “So, they’re reaching for students that would ordinarily come to us,” Tromp said. She says the decline comes as they are accepting more students. “We made a significantly greater percentage of offers.”

An Open Letter from the Medical Community on America’s Road Deaths
Jonathan Slotkin, MD and Eric Topol, MD
May 14, 2026

We are surgeons, emergency physicians, nurses, PAs, rehabilitation specialists, intensivists, researchers, and more. We treat, study, and prevent motor vehicle injuries. Many of us hold the wounded in our hands. We are writing because the evidence now says that much of this suffering is preventable.

More than 100 Americans die in car crashes every day. Cyclists killed by red-light runners. Pedestrians killed by drunk drivers. Families killed by someone confusing the accelerator and the brake. In 2024, more than 39,000 people died on American roads. Crashes are the leading cause of death for Americans aged 16 to 24, accounting for nearly half of all fatalities in that age group. 5.1 million crash injuries required medical attention in 2023 alone. The combined economic and quality-of-life toll exceeds $1 trillion annually. That is larger than the entire Medicare budget.

No other cause of death at this scale would be met with this little urgency. As clinicians, we no longer accept it.

Safer infrastructure, better speed enforcement, impaired driving prevention, and public transit all save lives and deserve continued investment. Autonomous vehicles are not a replacement for those efforts, but their safety data has reached a threshold we cannot responsibly ignore.

A 2025 peer-reviewed study examined 56.7 million fully driverless miles on public roads and found an 85% reduction in serious-injury-or-worse crashes compared with human drivers on the same streets. Waymo’s most recent data release, covering more than 170 million miles, shows the results strengthening: a 92% reduction in serious-injury-or-worse crashes, with pedestrian injury crashes down 92% and cyclist crashes 85%, respectively. Intersection crashes, among the deadliest we see, fell 96%. If these results hold as deployment scales, the population-level effect could rival seatbelts or the decline of smoking. In medical research, when an intervention demonstrates this magnitude of benefit, we work to change the standard of care…