A Triple Undercurrent Converges: Is the US Stock Market Facing a “Perfect Storm”?

After a long stretch of celebration, the US stock market seems to be quietly entering a foggy crossroads. The once unshakable AI narrative and liquidity feast are now being violently hit by three surging undercurrents. When the endless pit of capital expenditure, the profitability paradox caused by model in-fighting, and the Federal Reserve’s sudden pivot in monetary policy intertwine, unprecedented market uncertainty is looming over the market.

First Undercurrent: CSP credit spreads widen, and the “bottomless pit” concern of trillion-level Capex

In the past, tech giants could take whatever they wanted in capital markets thanks to strong cash flows and endless stories. However, as the “cash-guzzling” nature of AI infrastructure has been exposed, the bond market’s direction is subtly shifting. Recently, the risk premium for US investment-grade tech debt has widened significantly. Bonds issued by giants such as SpaceX and Alphabet were dumped right at the start of listing, with prices weakening. This clearly shows that bond investors are no longer blindly optimistic—they are starting to worry that the scale of these tech giants’ capital expenditure (Capex) on AI will far exceed expectations.

More worrying is that even if the giants continue to maintain high Capex, its structure may also become distorted. In a backdrop of extremely strong demand and extremely tight supply, inflation in components such as storage and memory is especially pronounced. Hardware price increases are swallowing up massive portions of capital expenditure, creating a risk that effective computing capacity investment—besides storage—may face no growth or even contraction. When a giant’s capital spending approaches or even exceeds operating cash flow, tighter financing channels and rising debt costs will become the sword of Damocles hanging overhead.

Second Undercurrent: Model capabilities surge, and large models fall into a “moat vs. profitability” paradox

As compute power surges, large models’ capabilities are also advancing rapidly. However, an awkward business paradox is playing out among midstream model providers: if AI can really save enterprises $1 million, why wouldn’t enterprises be willing to pay $100k for a large model company?

With open-source models advancing, the moats of closed-source models are narrowing. As the capability gap shrinks, they end up like “tap water” utility products—users only accept very low prices. To fight for market share, API call prices crash. Midstream vendors become “logistics carriers” who package expensive compute into cheap tokens. Enterprises do achieve “cost throttling” through AI, but this portion of saved costs turns into the company’s net profit and does not flow to large model providers. With fixed costs extremely high and marginal costs extremely low, unless absolute monopoly forms or the models evolve into Agents (intelligent agents) that can charge based on results, large model vendors will find it difficult to see any glimmer of profitability.

Third Undercurrent: Vosh’s “practical monetarism” and the unknown of liquidity ebbing

If industry-level worries are still within a controllable range, then a macro liquidity turning point could trigger systemic shocks. Since mid-2025, when rumors circulated that Kevin Vosh might take over as Fed chair, risk assets such as Bitcoin had already topped out ahead of time. Although the AI industry has temporarily held up under strong fundamentals, Vosh’s “practical monetarism” is becoming a blade hanging over US stocks.

Vosh’s core demands are “rate cuts + balance sheet reduction,” especially through aggressive quantitative tightening (QT) to shrink the balance sheet—directly reclaiming excess liquidity to suppress inflation expectations. He shows “zero tolerance” toward high inflation, and explicitly lists large-scale investment in the AI space as a core variable influencing inflation, warning that it could push future inflation higher. More deadly is that the market has gotten used to the Fed’s “bearish option”—stepping in to rescue US stocks when they fall. But under Vosh’s framework, even if faced with political pressure for rate cuts from the White House, the Fed would formulate policy strictly based on economic data, no longer swayed by political interference. Without a clear backstop, everything can only be guessed—and for US stocks that heavily rely on liquidity-based valuations, this is undoubtedly a major risk.

Closing Remarks

As CSP financing difficulty increases, large models fall into a profitability quagmire, and the Federal Reserve’s liquidity faucet faces tightening, these three issues intertwine to form the biggest uncertainty in the current US stock market. In the earnings disclosure window of July to August, the market will engage in fierce competition around AI momentum and cash-flow conditions. In this phase filled with unknowns, blind optimism is no longer appropriate. Reverence for risk and re-evaluating the true value of assets may be the most rational choice for now. #比特币 #币圈