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The Economy’s Scoreboard Is Tilting Toward Owners, Not Workers

The weirdest part of today’s economy is that it can feel strong and still leave people unimpressed.

Stocks rip, profits expand, and the richest companies get richer, yet the median household still feels like it is grinding for small wins.

This story explains why: a bigger slice of output is flowing to capital, not labor. And with AI accelerating the ability to scale revenue without scaling headcount, that gap may get wider before it gets narrower.

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Think of the economy like a pie split between two claimants: labor (wages and benefits) and capital (profits and returns to owners). Over the last four decades, that split has shifted.

  • Labor’s share has drifted down meaningfully from the early 1980s to today.

  • Corporate profits’ share has climbed, and markets have put an even richer valuation on those profits.

  • The result is an economy where wealth effects matter more, because stock gains can drive spending for the households that own most assets.

The IBM vs Nvidia comparison captures the mood perfectly. You can build something far more valuable and profitable with a fraction of the workforce. That is not a morality play. It is a business model evolution: software, algorithms, and networks scale fast, and automation keeps the payroll from scaling with it.

There are three reasons this matters for investors:

1) Wealth swings will matter more for the real economy.
When household stock wealth is huge relative to income, market pullbacks can hit spending faster than a mild labor slowdown would. Upside markets can also keep consumption alive even when hiring is sluggish.

2) The winners are the companies that monetize scale.
Businesses with high operating leverage can grow earnings faster than costs. AI can increase that leverage by lowering marginal labor needs for a lot of white-collar tasks.

3) The fight shifts from jobs to margins.
If labor’s share compresses, margins can stay structurally elevated in certain sectors. That pushes the market toward durable cash flows, pricing power, and companies that sit in the flow of capital allocation.

This is also why the disconnect in sentiment persists. A strong stock market is real economic fuel, but it mostly fuels the people who already have financial assets. Meanwhile, wage gains that merely keep pace with inflation do not feel like winning, even if the headline economy looks fine.

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Actionable Stuff

  • Own the capital stack. If more GDP is flowing to profits and asset values, the cleanest exposure is through asset managers and capital markets platforms.

  • Favor operating leverage. Businesses that can grow without adding people tend to win in this regime.

  • Watch labor data through a different lens. The question is less about unemployment spiking and more about wage pressure, productivity, and margin durability.

  • Avoid companies that need headcount growth to grow revenue. Those models get squeezed when automation improves and budgets tighten.

  • Expect policy noise. As the labor share falls, politics gets louder. That can add volatility without changing the long-run trend.

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Top Picks

Ares Management (NYSE: ARES)

If more of the economy’s upside is flowing to capital, private credit and alternative managers tend to stay in the power seat.

Ares is built around that exact trend: gathering institutional money, putting it to work in yield-hungry strategies, and collecting fees along the way.

In an AI world where companies can scale revenue without scaling payroll, the constraint often becomes financing, not hiring, which is a tailwind for the private-capital ecosystem.

What to watch: Fee-related earnings growth, fundraising cadence, and credit performance metrics if defaults tick up.

FactSet (NYSE: FDS)

When capital matters more, data matters more. FactSet is a picks-and-shovels play on the rising complexity of portfolio management, risk control, and asset allocation.

If households and institutions lean harder on markets for wealth creation, the demand for analytics, workflow tools, and decision support tends to stay sticky.

It is not flashy, but it fits a regime where information becomes a recurring budget line item.

What to watch: Annual subscription value growth, client retention, and any commentary on financial-services hiring budgets.

Carlyle Group (NASDAQ: CG)

Carlyle is another clean way to express the capital-over-labor theme without needing a perfect macro call. Alternatives benefit when traditional wage-driven growth slows and institutions keep chasing return targets.

Carlyle’s platform gives it multiple levers across private equity, credit, and infrastructure style strategies, which can be valuable in a world where AI amplifies winner-take-more dynamics and pushes more value toward owners of assets.

What to watch: Fundraising momentum, realizations and carry potential, plus management commentary on deployment pace.

Onto Innovation (NYSE: ONTO)

The labor-to-capital shift is partly an automation story, and semicap equipment is where that becomes physical.

Onto sells process control and inspection tools that help chipmakers improve yields and productivity.

If AI keeps driving data center buildouts, the semiconductor supply chain stays under pressure to produce more efficiently, and that is when inspection and metrology spending tends to stay relevant.

What to watch: Orders tied to advanced packaging and leading-edge nodes, plus gross margin stability.

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Bottom Line

The economy is increasingly rewarding scale, ownership, and operating leverage. That can leave workers feeling stuck even when markets look great, and it can make market swings matter more for spending than they used to. The investing angle is straightforward: lean into the platforms that compound capital, the market infrastructure that monetizes activity, and the productivity stack that helps businesses grow with fewer people.

That’s it for today’s edition—thanks for reading! Reply to this email with any feedback or let me know which macro trends or markets you’d like me to cover next.

Best Regards,
—Noah Zelvis
Macro Notes