Bloomberg Surveillance TV: April 30th, 2026

**SPEAKER_2** (0:02)
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**Jonathan Ferro** (0:11)
This is the Bloomberg Surveillance podcast. I'm Jonathan Ferro, along with Lisa Abramowitz and Annmarie Hordern. Join us each day for insight from the best in markets, economics and geopolitics. From our global headquarters in New York City, we are live on Bloomberg Television weekday mornings from 6 to 9 a.m. Eastern.
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Here's the view on Wall Street this morning. Stocks looking for some direction as Big Tech plans another massive AI spend in the face of what could be tightening central banks worldwide. Joining us, Sharmin Mossavar-Rahmani, the Wealth Management CIO and head of the Investment Strategy Group at Goldman Sachs. Sharmin, it's good to see you. Hello.
Thank you for being here. Are central banks about to become a headwind to this equity market rally?

**Sharmin Mossavar-Rahmani** (0:59)
We actually had a very good exhibit on one of our client calls. If you look at the 21 past strikes that the US has had on the Middle East or North Africa, up to eight weeks after the initial strike, the equity markets have been up on average 4 percent, and that's exactly where we are. So everybody's saying, oh, the equity market is going ahead. How can they ignore the price of oil, whether it's WTO or Brent? What is exactly going on? Growth is still robust. Obviously, we're going to get Q1 numbers, but I think nobody's thinking that we're in a recession is imminent.
If you look at the earnings we've gotten, they've been incredible, substantially greater than consensus.
This is a pretty significant, in terms of exceeding expectations, it's a pretty significant number. It's not like, oh, we exceeded earnings by 2 percent, 3 percent, 5 percent, it's double digit. And if you look at the number of quarters where we've exceeded expectations, the number of consecutive quarters, it's just incredible. And so when people talk about the impact of the war, we have said the US economy is unbelievably resilient, and people continue to underestimate that. So as we look at this, I don't think anybody knows exactly how long this will last. If it lasts a lot longer and all prices stay at these levels, then the economy will be weaker. So the idea that people can raise rates in the face of weakening economy, especially in the US when you have a dual mandate, I think we need to factor in a lot of uncertainty.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:33)
Do you think that there is a lack of logic when people say, well, oil prices are at this level, and you see still that robust growth in the economy. So that means that the inflationary impacts can get passed through much more directly and easily because of the capex bend, because of how well these companies are doing. Do you see that as a logical connection, or do you think it just hasn't been long enough with oil prices at this level?

**Sharmin Mossavar-Rahmani** (2:56)
There are actually two points you're right. It hasn't been long enough, so that's number one, because if this war were to last and we see oil prices here, eventually we will get to negative numbers in the equity market. But for now, the idea that we're up four or five percent is actually totally in line with history. And from our perspective, one of the pillars of our investment philosophy is history is a useful guide. So first, we have that as the backdrop that we need to follow. The other thing that people need to think about is the energy intensity in terms of usage of oil is a lot different than the early 80s. So when we had the Arab oil embargo, then we had the Iran-Iraq war, we had the Iranian Revolution, prices skyrocketed. But at that time, the energy consumption in the US in terms of barrels per capita per year were substantially higher. In fact, it was around, let's say, 30 barrels a year. That number is down to around 23, 24 now.
There's also a view that energy, crude oil, will not impact as much. Obviously, it will. Fertilizers, we hear about all of these things. But it has to last a while.

**SPEAKER_4** (4:01)
It does affect the cost of components. We saw this with some of the hyperscalers reporting earnings last night. Meta, for example, increased their expected capex in part because of higher component costs, maybe also because of some of the transportation issues that people are experiencing. At what point does that become a sticking point? Maybe not for the biggest tech companies, but for some of the tech companies out there that are facing an existential threat but are having to pay that much more to even play ball.