Bloomberg Surveillance TV: September 14th, 2026

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

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 AM Eastern.

Subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen. And as always, on the Bloomberg Terminal and the Bloomberg Business App. We begin this out with stocks tumbling as a potential AI pullback rattles investors. The Anthropic CEO, Dario Mode, presenting a three-step plan with the goal of pacing the frontier. Lori Calvasina of RBC joins us now for more. Lori, good morning.

Lori Calvasina (0:49)

Good morning.

Jonathan Ferro (0:49)

How much earnings risk is building here?

Lori Calvasina (0:51)

So look, one of the things we've been doing in our modeling is just taking the bottom-up consensus and hair-cutting it by 10 percent. And in previous versions, earlier in the summer, we were baking in a 5 percent hair-cut to account for the non-AI stocks, potentially having some pressures from the Iran war, inflation, etc. In our last couple of updates, we've expanded that to 10 percent to potentially account for some froth on the AI side of things. Not that we were pounding the table and saying it was going to happen, but there has been some concern building on that front for a few months now. So we wanted to reflect that in numbers to try to calm investors' nerves a bit.

Jonathan Ferro (1:26)

Do you think there is a slower build out on the horizon here?

Lori Calvasina (1:28)

So it's funny, if you look at CapEx data, and I will say this has been a set of charts in our deck that's been a bit more popular over the last few months, and it doesn't necessarily have big do this, do that conclusions. It's just interesting. But we look at CapEx growth in the S&P 500, the two key updates are actually showing it hitting new highs year over year. If you look at the top 10 market cap names, which is where you've got the big AI behemoths, you've been hitting peaks essentially.

If you look at the rest of the other 490 stocks, you're very, very early days in a CapEx build out cycle. So you're up maybe third innings, you're showing some growth year over year, that became much more apparent in 2Q.

And we've been telling people, if you're concerned about the CapEx story going forward, take your attention off those top 10 market cap names, look at the rest of the index. And you're gonna laugh, but I'll give you one example from the last reporting season, is I got very excited reading insurance companies. And I called up one of my healthcare analysts or insurance analysts, and I said, this is really interesting stuff, because I'm seeing companies, there was one company in particular that was sort of saying, we're not engaged in FOMO here. But then they went on to talk about how they were doing these upgrades or thinking about these upgrades, and AI was kind of prompting that. So that's been an element that we've been trying to focus people on. Are you starting to get some CapEx upgrades, IT upgrades, AI sparking it, maybe not the only thing that's happening. But that to me is sort of the more interesting part of the story, is some of these derivative impacts.

Lisa Abramowicz (2:53)

How immune is that story to the frontier models, and more specifically to successful IPOs of the likes of Anthropic and next year of OpenAI?

Lori Calvasina (3:01)

You know, I'm not sure I have the answer to that question, to be honest. I know that right now, though, kind of going back to the original issue we're dealing with, is that there's just a lot of jitters in the market. And we made a comment last week in our weekly that we were expecting a 5 to 10 percent pulldown. We thought that those risks had risen. We've got midterm elections. The last couple cycles, you've seen extreme volatility in both directions in the back half of the year. We've got interest rate risk. And I don't care what's going on when the bond market and macro investors are worried about interest rates rising, everything else hits harder. So I think that's part of what we're doing. We've got a new Fed chair. You typically see volatility in markets when you're ushering in new leadership at the Fed. We've seen that in Warsh's three predecessors.

And we've also got the war, frankly, which a lot of companies didn't really, frankly, talk that much about this last reporting season. But two reporting seasons ago, a lot of them were saying they expected it to be wrapped up by the summer or to queue, and that hasn't happened. So you've got a lot weighing on this market right now.