While US consumer sentiment has seen some recent improvement, households remain concerned about the cost of living. Spending is also increasingly driven by high income households, with one study suggesting that the top 20% of households by income are responsible for more than 60% of consumer spending.

And stock markets? Flying.  Which raises a big question. As JP Morgan markets analyst Kriti Gupta points out, the market rally of this first half of 2026 has seen “more than double the average returns traditionally seen in the first half of the year … but for an economy that is largely driven by the American consumer, are the stock market gains reflecting the underlying reality?”

Her next question is more generative: “And perhaps more importantly, should they be?”

As so often, the answer surely is it depends. As Gupta remind us, 37% of the S&P 500 is driven by tech. By contrast, companies most directly exposed to consumer spending comprise a smaller proportion of index and are growing at a slower rate, due to a range of local and global factors.

However, tech investment is not narrowly contained in high-technology enterprises. “From the industrial components that go into building data centres to the utilities supporting them with power, a tech-driven buildout can cascade across sectors.”

But markets don’t simply indicate flows, they’re a mark of confidence in the future of the tech company’s promise, particularly the broad transformative effects of AI across the economy.

Never the twain shall meet?

And that’s fine, plausibly: “It’s a new era where both the stock market and sentiment can diverge without necessarily signalling trouble, as forward-looking equity prices increasingly reflect a fast-paced, AI-driven reality while the real economy adapts more gradually.”

The key point here seems to be less a case of divergence not mattering so much as a belief that markets and the real economy will converge incrementally and unevenly.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it will happen. Ultimately, to what extent the promise of real economic transformation is delivered is something we will discover with the passage of time.

But if the divergence between financial markets and the real economy is not necessarily a warning sign for markets, what does it tell us about the underlying economy?

Consumer pessimism is a snapshot of the present, and specifically of the concentration of wealth and how uneven gains are currently distributed. Does that tell us something about what a future AI-driven economy will look like, or will the new technology transform the fundamental structure of capital accumulation and resource distribution?

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