Animal Spirits: Are Higher Rates Worse Than ZIRP?

Today’s Animal Spirits is brought to you by ProShares and Janus Henderson:

On today’s show, we discuss:

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Tweets/BlueSky:

One of the main reasons so many breadth indicators are off the charts is because the concentration in the index is like nothing we've ever experienced.

The top 5 stocks in the S&P 500 are equal to the bottom 434. (67-500) pic.twitter.com/dKIqi3KYJT

— Michael Batnick (@michaelbatnick) October 8, 2026

This is what crowd out looks like. pic.twitter.com/PCNeSymOGW

— Jason Furman (@jasonfurman) October 8, 2026

From Egan Jones. Since 2004, the Chinese economy has outgrown the US by basically any metric you can think of. But American financial assets have clobbered Chinese ones however you measure it. pic.twitter.com/D3KUGuhtHG

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) October 9, 2026

Zuck and Alexandr Wang talk about Meta’s $100B bet on building a frontier model.

Here was Meta CFO Susan Li’s take:

“I just want to tell you if this doesn't work, this is going to be really, really bad. It's going to be very, very bad in financial terms…It's like, it has to… https://t.co/c87czkuMC0 pic.twitter.com/eUYJHhk2rp

— Bearly AI (@bearlyai) October 12, 2026

How I’ve Used AI to Generate a Few Hundred Thousand Dollars in New Revenue in 4–6 Weeks

I have a story about how I have used AI coupled with changed human behavior to drive a significant change to business results in my business and very much increase the top line.

I am a vocal… pic.twitter.com/7d7QlC9Ypl

— jameson (big deck energy) (@jamesonhaslam) October 8, 2026

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