Earlier this week, I suggested US equities would have a hard time rising without Nvidia.

That was a rational thing to say. After all, the stock has, at various intervals, been just about the only thing that matters for the “broad” US equity market. Indeed, as one PM-turned Bloomberg blogger pointed out, Nvidia’s capable of singlehandedly moving the entire market by 1% or more.

But I was wrong. Wrong to suggest equities couldn’t muster gains at the index level absent an assist from Jensen Huang. Nvidia fell on Thursday despite an across-the-board beat, but the broad market held up ok, even as Wall Street trimmed gains into the US afternoon.

To my credit, I did suggest, while editorializing around the company’s results, that even if the guide wasn’t spectacular enough to clear what’s now an impossibly high bar, the numbers were sufficient (and the commentary around the Blackwell delays sufficiently benign) to keep the stock from suffering a “sell the news” plunge of the sort that might completely derail the market. It was a rough day for Nvidia, and in market cap terms the loss was obviously quite large ($197 billion), but there wasn’t anything disorderly about the price action. Just the retail frenzy you’d expect under the circumstances.

Nvidia’s report effectively closed the book on what was left of Q2 reporting season, and if you’re wondering, things turned out pretty well, at least on the profits side, with 80% of companies beating even as sales beats were harder to come by. “The breadth of EPS revisions is a big positive this season,” SocGen’s Manish Kabra wrote Thursday, in a brief update. “Profits are the glue for the S&P 500, and they are still sticky and strong,” he added.

The figure on the left, above, gives you some context for the beat rate(s). On the right is just a 30,000-foot view of forward profits.

For all the recession hand-wringing (and I’ve engaged in my share of it), it’s hard to make the case when the labor market and spending aggregates steadfastly refuse to exhibit anything like unequivocal weakness (which is something different, you’ll note, than downside “surprises” versus economists’ forecasts) while corporate profits remain on the up and up.

Just Thursday, the BEA revised Q2’s spending impulse sharply higher and the four-week moving average for initial jobless claims slipped to an 11-week low below 232,000.

Yes, Dollar General’s report sounded the alarm on low-income shoppers but — and I’m trying to figure out a nice way to say this — the only stock that’s going to get dumped on news that Dollar General’s (bare)foot traffic is slowing is Dollar General, and maybe its peers.

That’s not to say there’s nothing to glean from the struggles of the poor. There is. It’s just to say that what can be gleaned on that front is, for now, more about America’s socioeconomic crisis than it is about stock prices, which are just profits multiplied by the prevailing mood among investors.

Oh, and speaking of the bottom line, have a look at the chart below, updated with the latest NIPA figures released on Thursday.

Suffice to say after-tax corporate profits remain robust. Aggregate margins rose in Q2 to 15.4% from 15.2% in Q1. Those would be records in any pre-pandemic year.

Tellingly, companies’ interest payments hit yet another record low as a share of economic profits.

Now please, explain to me again what a shame it’d be to tax those profits at a slightly higher rate in order to help out the Dollar General crowd.