Episode 410: The Tariff Drama Is Temporary – But AI Is Here to Stay
On this week's Stansberry Investor Hour, Dan and Corey welcome Rob Spivey back to the show. Rob is the director of research at our corporate affiliate Altimetry. With both buy-side and sell-side experience, he offers his unique perspective on the markets today.
Rob kicks off the show by describing how Altimetry uses "Uniform accounting" to get a better sense of a company's financials and the health of the U.S. market as a whole. This leads to a conversation about corporate profitability, credit risk, and the future of artificial intelligence ("AI"). Rob explains the role Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency is playing in implementing AI at the federal level, how AI could revamp Medicare and Medicaid, and what the fiscal multiplier effect means for government spending and AI...
Stuff like defense spending has a fiscal multiplier effect of 1.1, 1.2, 1.3. You could argue some of that is investment, it's not actually just spend. Because when the U.S. government spends that, that means greater [gross domestic product] growth... Not all spending is bad for the U.S. government. But the whole entire idea of unlocking AI is about getting more efficient for less fiscal multiplier spend.
Next, Rob breaks down the entire AI ecosystem and its many parts. He cites Twilio as an example of an AI company that's leveraging this technology in interesting ways today. And he goes in depth on a hidden opportunity in AI investing: companies that are warehousing and organizing data. "Nobody's paying attention to them now," he says. Rob then covers the government's profit surplus, how it differs from China's, and how a trade war could lead to a real war...
China doesn't have the corporate profitability to allow its government to be able to tax – to be able to then drive growth by actually being able to spend on a deficit basis. They don't have that, and we do in the U.S... Maybe don't kick China so hard because China actually doesn't really have another leg to stand on. And if we kick them too hard, we might end up in a hot war – kinetic war – as opposed to a trade war.
Then, Rob divulges America's secret weapon for corporate dominance: the Bill of Rights. He notes that it protects innovation and gives the U.S. a leg up on a global scale. After that, Rob discusses large language models and how they're trained, the usefulness of Google's NotebookLM, and the "revolution" that will be happening in AI in the next three to six months...
The power of actually unlocking AI to do powerful tasks and create significant value for the U.S. economy – that's the biggest thing that's going to happen... Be watching it not in the mode of, "What's happening from a political perspective? What's happening from a tariff perspective?" Keep your eye on the ball on what's going to happen with AI, because that's going to set up a potentially decadelong investment opportunity to those people who are paying attention.
Click here or on the image below to watch the video interview with Rob right now. For the full audio episode, click here.
(Additional past episodes are located here.)
The transcript is coming soon.
This Week's Guest
Rob Spivey is the director of research at Valens Research and its Altimetry and FA Alpha businesses. He has previously worked for the Abernathy Group, Legacy Capital Management, and Credit Suisse. With both buy-side and sell-side experience, Rob has a unique perspective of how markets work together and can offer contrary signals.
Rob has appeared on CNBC, been featured on podcasts like Money Life With Chuck Jaffe, and been quoted in Barron's, Bloomberg, U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, and Yahoo Finance. He has presented at higher-learning institutions including Northeastern University, DePaul University, and Hult International Business School, as well as been a judge at the CFA Institute Research Challenge.
Rob is a CFA charterholder and member of the CFA Institute. He received his bachelor's degree in business administration with a concentration in finance from Northeastern University.