Who’s bearish on the world’s largest economy? Overtly bearish, I mean?

Nobody. The answer’s nobody.

Stagnant hiring aside — who needs to hire when you have Claude? — things are going great. Or at least they were until very recently. Just ask The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow tracker which, as the updated figure below shows, is still tipping a real growth impulse north of 4% for Q4.

As one observer quipped last month, “Maybe we should shut down the government more often.” (Two weeks later, the government shut down again.)

You might quibble that spending’s concentrated in the upper half of the “K” in the “K-shaped” economy, but that’s been the case for quite a while now and it’s as sustainable as the stock rally.

That’s wry humor, but it expresses a general truth. Recall that sentiment diverged dramatically this month between consumers in the top tercile of stock holdings and those with no stocks, according to the University of Michigan.

Anyway, in a Monday note, Nomura’s Charlie McElligott described the mood among real money fixed income investors who harbor what he called a “Goldilocks Plus” take on the outlook, with one caveat.

The US economy, professional investors reckon, “maintain[s] so many tailwinds that it’s effectively recession proof for the next t+6 months,” McElligott wrote, citing nominal GDP growth of 7%, a deficit of 6-7% of GDP, the 100% capex pull-forward depreciation provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and, of course, healthy corporate profits.

The updated table above, from Goldman, shows that 82% of S&P 500 firms which’ve reported so far beat on earnings. Nearly three quarters beat on the top-line.

Another criticism of the US economy (i.e., in addition to sundry inegalitarian critiques) says it’s by now a house of cards that’s overly-dependent on AI spending.

I wouldn’t “argue” with that, as such, but it’s a little too “if you leave out all the good stuff, it’s bad” for my liking. McElligott mentioned the tailwind from AI capex which, The Wall Street Journal noted last week, trails only The Louisiana Purchase on a list of “most momentous capital efforts.”

As discussed at length here, Meta, Alphabet and Amazon are set to spend half a trillion just between them this year on AI-related projects, leases and infrastructure.

McElligott went on to say that fixed income clients are also convinced the disinflation trend’s intact, particularly with a ongoing normalization in the shelter component, which should free up at least two more Fed cuts by year-end.

Queried on downside risks, the pros McElligott spoke to focused “almost exclusively” on cracks in the labor market. When Charlie asked if anyone considered the pervasiveness of upside macro data surprises (sans last week’s jobs canaries) a “sign of an early-cycle kickoff” — which is to say the beginning of some new macro renaissance — “not one single person raised their hand,” he said.

In other words, money managers’ otherwise rosy outlook is tempered by what McElligott described as “skepticism on the sustainability of current [growth] dynamics” in the context of left-tail concerns about labor downside.