Believe it or not, we’re still “in” Q2 reporting season. It’s almost over, but not quite.

Headed into this week, 91% of S&P 500 companies and around 85% of market cap had reported. Last quarter was, in a few words, one of the most impressive periods in living memory for corporate America.

I realize this talking point’s a bit tired by now, but try to wrap your mind around this: The S&P 500 grew the bottom line by 31% YoY in Q2, and that excludes write-ups tied to mega-cap tech’s stake in Anthropic and other AI investments that’ve juiced “other income” at Alphabet and Amazon, to name the most prominent examples.

Although the median company and ex-AI, ex-energy names fared very well too, the biggest gains were (obviously) for AI infrastructure stocks.

The figure above, from Goldman’s Ben Snider, compares earnings growth for the hyper-scalers and “companies benefiting from their capex,” as he put it, to profit growth for the rest of the index excluding energy names (whose profits were inflated by rising oil prices).

As you can see, AI infrastructure stocks grew the bottom-line by more than half last quarter, up from an already astounding 48% in Q1. Those figures do not (I repeat do not) include the “other income” mentioned above.

Here’s an amusing caveat: Management’s still very reluctant to actually put a number on AI-related productivity gains.

The figure on the left, above, from the same Goldman note, shows that a mere 2% of companies (so, basically nobody) was willing to quantify the impact of AI-enabled productivity growth on the bottom line, while just one in 10 could put a number on productivity gains from AI for a “use case.”

As Snider went on to say, editorializing around the figure on the right, “earnings results showed a modest and statistically insignificant difference in earnings growth between the companies quantifying AI productivity gains [for use cases] and other S&P 500 companies.”

Meanwhile, a net 37% of respondents to BofA’s uber bullish monthly fund manager poll expect double-digit profit growth over the next 12 months.

The figure above gives you the historical context for that metric. It’s exceedingly rare for the balance of fund managers to project double-digit EPS growth.

There again you can see that historically, the sort of profit growth (and expectations thereof) we’re currently witnessing typically only happens coming out of recessions.

The last time fund managers were this optimistic on corporate bottom lines, bundles of Bored Ape Yacht club NFTs were selling at Sotheby’s for $24.4 million.