All-Time Highs, Record Margins, and the Data Center Hoax

In this episode of Money Matters, brought to you by the Greenberg Financial Group, Dean opens with a warning for a week when everything feels good. The S&P has traveled from about 7,300 to 7,800 in two weeks on news that has not really changed, and his point is not that it ends tomorrow. It is that you should not forget how you felt a week and a half ago. From there he gets into why he believes AI is the beginning of what computers were to our economy rather than another dot com, what a shrinking workforce has to do with all of it, why the IRS and our air traffic control systems are still running on technology built decades ago, and why Chandler, Gilbert and Mesa keep growing while Tucson keeps saying no.

Then Dave, Sebastian, Dylan and Todd pick up the number that got their attention. Net profit margin for the S&P 500 came in at 16.9 percent, the highest in history, and Todd explains what that actually means using a lemonade stand that costs 30 dollars to run. The market hit its third straight week higher with all time highs on the S&P, the Russell 2000 and the equal weighted S&P, and the VIX sat at a low for the year. Dave's word for it is complacency, right as we head into the eight weeks that have historically been the toughest stretch of the calendar.

The guys also dig into Berkshire's latest 13F, where Google is now the third largest position at roughly 38 billion dollars, alongside a return to Delta and a move into home builders, which has Dave remembering when Buffett said he would never buy technology because he did not understand it. And there is a real conversation about who to believe, starting with the analyst who went on CNBC and said oil would hit 200 dollars if the Strait of Hormuz stayed closed for 30 days. It never got over about 120. The takeaway from the table is to take the headlines with a grain of salt and do your own homework.

Sebastian brings the story of Richland Parish, Louisiana, where Meta built a 10 billion dollar data center in an economically challenged part of the country. Sales tax revenue went from 21.3 million dollars last year to 65.3 million this year, some teachers there are in line for bonuses, and meanwhile New York became the first state to put a moratorium on building them. Plus a Tucson fun fact about three miles of Prohibition tunnels under downtown that city officials will not talk about, what Prohibition has to do with the fact that you pay income tax, and the 86 year old client who now wants her statements te