How's the stock market doing, minus AI?

Marketplace examines a widening divide between AI-linked stock market gains and the difficulties facing many other public companies. The S&P 500 has reached more than two dozen record highs this year, which the show notes attribute to AI firms. The episode’s central thesis is that headline index performance can obscure a substantially less favorable picture elsewhere in the market. Kai is the only presenter identified in the notes; no guests are named.

The episode brings together several ways of examining that divergence. Its stock market reporting focuses on the growing gap between AI and everything else, while a separate story considers what the tangled AI supply chain means for regulation. On the household side, rising auto loan delinquencies are presented as a possible warning of broader consumer strain and as a reflection of a K-shaped economy. These stories place strong market headlines alongside evidence of uneven financial conditions, rather than treating index records as a comprehensive measure of economic health.

The immediate context is the start of Q3 earnings season, with financial institutions kicking off reporting. The episode also includes Kai’s explanation of what the yield curve reveals about the bond market, adding another perspective beyond equities. Important questions remain unresolved in the notes: how large the market’s AI-versus-non-AI performance gap is, whether auto loan distress will spread more broadly, and what the upcoming earnings reports will show. The notes provide neither an AI-excluded market return nor a specific yield-curve reading, so they support an analysis of divergence rather than a quantified verdict on the market without AI.