MG Miriam Gottfried On 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.”

WSJ's Take On the Week · November 2026

Context

The hosts were discussing why CoreWeave's bonds and AI stocks have sold off even though demand for AI computing hasn't clearly weakened. Miriam, who covers wealth management, raises the concentration risk for ordinary investors holding both bonds and index funds.

Listen to the episode → More from Miriam Gottfried →

Transcript

WSJ's Take On the Week Around 18:03 into the episode

Telis Demos

two or three. It's just Microsoft. Very highly rated AA, et cetera. Highly rated,

Asa Fitch

…If they can't do that, or if it costs too much to do that, it's really, it's kind of a death knell for the business. I don't want to overstate it, but it's the future looks bleak. And if you're an equity investor, it's all about the future. I mean, if the business just stops, you're in trouble. Is

Miriam Gottfried

there also some sense that everything has become too concentrated as a bet on AI? I mean, 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, you know, I cover wealth management, 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, you're basically your entire portfolio is like levered to AI. And so if something happens, if there's a Slowdown if there's if the bubble bursts, like they're like, that's all you have. I mean, is there some sense from investors that like they need to be putting their money somewhere else right now? I

Telis Demos

want to step in for a second, Miriam. I think that's a great point. And I did quote one of the top folks at Pimco in one of my stories recently, Lodfi Karawi, talking about there being crowding out kind of within the AI Trade, basically that investors now have a lot of different choices for types…

Asa Fitch

Well, think about what are the purest pure play AI companies on the market. Like, there's the obvious one is NVIDIA because they sell chips that power AI Bonds that's pretty much all they do these days. They have a gaming business that's relatively small at this point. But the others really are…

Miriam Gottfried

then? I mean, given what you just said about how NVIDIA really needs Core Weave to exist, and given what you just said about how NVIDIA is also kind of a pure play AI bet at this point, like, I mean, I know it's like the biggest company in our stock market driving our stock market, but like, isn't…

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

“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.” — Asa Fitch, WSJ's Take On the Week