“Capital is king. The capital window is wide open. People can raise money. Anthropic can, at least they hope. They're hoping to raise up to $100 billion in this IPO. So what matters now for these companies like CoreWeave, like Anthropic, like others, is capital.”

WSJ's Take On the Week · November 2026

Context

Telis had summed up that the recent AI sell-off was more about financing costs and interest rates than a turning point for AI itself. Asa's takeaway: who can raise money, and at what price, is now the key question.

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Transcript

WSJ's Take On the Week Around 28:42 into the episode

Telis Demos

…the longer-term bond market is telling you is like, okay, maybe actually the Fed doesn't have to do that much more tightening before we do see things start to slow down. And so we don't need to buy 10-year bonds at like these huge yields because the Fed's going to stop maybe at an earlier point.

Miriam Gottfried

I like that idea.

Asa Fitch

Well, I think that one of the takeaways here is that capital is king, right? I mean, the capital window is wide open. People can raise money. I mean, Anthropic can, at least, they hope. They're hoping to raise up to $100 billion in this IPO. So what matters now for these companies like Core Weeve, like Anthropic, like others, is capital. And if you look at other players like Meta platforms, wants to, you know, they're raising $35 billion in equity at the moment, and they plan to raise another $60 billion through at the market transactions, meaning basically they just issue stock at different times strategically. You know, this is a lot of money.

Speaker 4

It's a lot of

Asa Fitch

money to ask investors to give them, essentially, to pay for AI. So there's this wave of people begging for money, if you will, and investors, whether you're a credit investor or on the equity side, having to weigh whether to give them that money or name your price for giving you that money. So I…

Telis Demos

I would say if they can raise equity, like if Meta can really raise all that equity, if Anthropic can go public successfully, like if the equity markets are there for everyone, that's a pretty good sign for the bond market because that's just more cushion for bondholders who are in a capital stack…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from WSJ's Take On the Week

“One thing that's kind of a question mark over all of this is this notion that NVIDIA wants to promote that the chips are commodities. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, has repeatedly talked about how these chips are quote-unquote fungible, almost as if they're a currency that you can just exchange from one thing to the next. That is to some degree true. … It's not always the case, though, because you have setups like Google's TPUs, for example.” — Asa Fitch, WSJ's Take On the Week

“I wrote in a story last month that 49% of new investment-grade bond issuance so far this year has been AI-linked. So if your wealth advisor is out there telling you, oh, you need to buy more bonds, and then you also own the S&P 500, your entire portfolio is levered to AI. And so if there's a slowdown, if the bubble bursts, that's all you have.” — Miriam Gottfried, WSJ's Take On the Week