With China’s DeepSeek pressuring investors to take a closer look at the current environment of artificial intelligence (AI) development within the U.S., some are taking a moment to question the accuracy of a much larger idea — American Exceptionalism. Ever since the end of the world wars, international leaders have acknowledged the “exorbitant privilege” the U.S. has with its de facto global reserve currency. With great privilege comes great responsibility. In this piece, we discuss the factors that define U.S. exceptionalism with its implications.

Catalyst for Market Volatility

The Chinese firm, Dee

What Is DeepSeek? 

The buzz around Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek began to stir over the weekend, prompting a “sell now ask questions later” attitude across tech shares on Monday. AI has been a major investment theme, but this time the headlines didn’t feature new chips or bold development plans. The AI chatbot utilized publicly available open-source models and, according to DeepSeek, performed on par or slightly surpassed the performance of its much larger U.S. rivals, at a fraction of the cost. The company stated costs to train the model - which skeptics were quick to point out ca

Fixed income investors will remember 2022–2024 as the longest and deepest yield curve inversion in modern history. After first inverting in July 2022, the yield curve didn’t revert back to “normal” until December 2024 — over a year after troughing at -1.09% (meaning the 2-year yield was higher than the 10-year yield by over 1%). Aggressive rate cut expectations by the Federal Reserve (Fed) and concerns about an economic slowdown that never materialized originally pushed longer-term yields down below shorter-maturity Treasury yields. However, with economic data coming in better than expected, inflationary pressure

Following the second inauguration of President Donald Trump, we decided to conduct a deep-dive analysis of stock market performance under different presidential administrations, hoping to glean some insight on if policy outweighs fundamentals. 

With President Joe Biden’s presidency officially closed, we can now see that the stock market, as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average (Dow), rose 39.4% under his leadership. When comparing it to Trump’s first term, Biden lagged by nearly 20%, as the Dow gained 57.4% under Trump (we us the Dow for this analysis because of its longer history). While lagging by nearl