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The current U.S. macro set-up must begin with a chart of Final Sales to Domestic Purchasers.

This U.S. macro data supplies the cleanest, most reliable picture, to gauge the current underlying momentum shown by U.S. Aggregate Demand.

Often referred to as "GDP plus imports, minus exports, minus inventory changes," it strips away the volatile "noise" of the global trade balance and corporate inventory cycles – to reveal the true core strength of American demand.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) can sometimes paint a misleading picture of everyday U.S. economic health. For example, if GDP grows significantly, because companies aggressively built-up inventories that are now sitting in warehouses, that isn't a sign of strong demand.

Conversely, if GDP looks weak, because consumers bought heavily from foreign manufacturers (surging imports), it masks the fact that domestic consumers are actually spending robustly.

In the FRED chart below, post-2022 normalization and post-pandemic stability is shown, running from 2022 to 2026.

Image Source: St Louis Federal Reserve

The Glide Path: From late 2021 through 2023, the FRED graph shows a steady deceleration. 

This highlights the cooling of the U.S. macro-economy; as COVID-era supply chains normalized, stimulus faded, and central banks raised interest rates to combat consumer inflation.

The "Soft Landing" Level: From 2024 through the beginning of 2026, the U.S. growth rate stabilizes cleanly at around +5% (in nominal terms).

For a U.S. macroeconomist, this suggests that, despite aggressive Fed monetary tightening, underlying U.S. domestic demand has remained resilient and well-anchored, without collapsing into a recession.

Now, let’s move on: to three concerning parts of the current U.S. macro setup.
 

Private Domestic Investment vs. AI Cap-ex Share

The following macro-material comes from “The FRED Blog,” posted May 18th, 2026.

Click the hot link: 
Rising capital expenditures and declining cash holdings during the AI boom

Image Source: St Louis Federal Reserve

What this data showed…

In the FRED graph above, the green dashed line in effect shows the cash holdings of U.S. nonfinancial firms in the corporate business sector as a share of the firm’s assets.

The FRED blog defined cash holdings as the sum of checkable deposits and currency, total time and savings deposits, and money market fund shares.

• Cash holdings increased from close to 2% in 1990 to close to 4% in the year before the Global Financial Crisis
• It increased during that crisis but remained just above 4% in the 2010s
• It increased again during the COVID-19 recession, reaching more than 6%
• Then it decreased and has fluctuated around 5.5% recently

With data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the solid blue line shows the increase in capital expenditures typically associated with the AI boom.

It’s the ratio of private fixed investment in information processing equipment and software to GDP.

The path of this ratio has three distinct phases:

• This ratio surged through the 1990s and peaked at the dot-com crash, followed by a steep decline from 2000 to 2002
• The ratio remained relatively stable from 2002 through the Great Financial Crisis and into 2023
• It then jumped sharply, from 3.9% in the third quarter of 2023 to 4.7% in the fourth quarter of 2024

In May 2026, it has surpassed the fourth quarter 2000 peak -- for the first time.

Future AI Investment

As AI-related investment expands further, cash holdings won’t be sufficient to fund it, and firms will be more dependent on external financing.

Princeton Markus Academy’s Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh argues that the AI buildout has been changing who owns and finances AI infrastructure:

Hyperscalers are moving away from fully self-funding data centers and are increasingly combining owned capacity with leased facilities, joint ventures, and partnerships with specialized third-party developers.

Monitoring both the adequacy of internal funding and the availability of external finance will be critical -- for assessing the health of the AI boom.

Want to know the current OpenAI & Anthropic LLM revenue run rate? Just $67 Billion.

What About Cap Ex Spending on AI?

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and Wall Street analysts track the five largest tech hyper-scalers as being on pace to exceed $1 trillion in combined AI capital expenditure -- across the 2025–2026 window alone.

Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

Nvidia (NVDA Quick QuoteNVDA - Free Report) remains the central recipient of this capital deployment. 
Its data center revenue scaled rapidly to meet this hardware demand, fueled by hyper-scalers spending massive portions of their operating cash flows on AI infrastructure.

The story sold to stock and bond investors is that the chip industry is in a 'super-cycle.' That is a double-edged sword:

Huge Cap Ex spending… Then, MULTIPLE YEARS pass, where there is no incremental need for expensive chips.