Goldman Sachs Partners: Ten Key Topics for the Rest of the Year After Jackson Hole
Alina Collins
Goldman partner Mark Wilson laid out ten key themes for H2 2026 after the Jackson Hole symposium, spanning AI revenue inflection to U.S. midterm elections — his core call is that H1's four drivers will either hold or break, and that verdict shapes the full-year return.
What drove H1 — and can it last?
Wilson distills H1 into four drivers: continued AI buildout, broad-based earnings strength, accelerating capex and consumption, and market resilience to geopolitics and high rates.
This means → H2 is not about finding a new narrative. It is about which of these four lines snaps first.
In plain terms = the market rose not because risks disappeared, but because money and earnings outran them. H2 tests whether that race continues.
AI capex has been enormous — is the revenue inflection here?
Wilson ranks the AI revenue inflection at hyperscalers — Amazon, Microsoft and peers who are building AI infrastructure at massive scale — as his number-one theme.
Amazon's and Microsoft's earnings calls have begun to validate the return-on-investment case; DeepSeek's recent sharp price hikes further confirm AI monetisation momentum.
This means → the market's focus is shifting from "how much AI spends" to "how much AI earns." Once the revenue inflection is confirmed, the valuation framework flips from burn tolerance to earnings delivery.
Record earnings and capital markets — sustainable?
Wilson expects Europe's EPS growth acceleration to outpace the U.S. in H2 on a second-derivative basis — meaning Europe's earnings improvement is speeding up.
On the capital-markets side, H1 equity issuance — IPOs, secondaries, and hybrid deals — set an all-time record; buybacks are up year-on-year, and announced cash M&A already exceeds the full-year equity-issuance estimate.
In plain terms = the market is issuing new stock, buying back old stock, and doing mega-deals all at once. That looks contradictory, but 1990s history shows markets can keep rising even with net positive equity issuance — as long as earnings hold up.
M&A heat and "physical AI" — two underappreciated threads?
Wilson flags UK M&A intensity: the ratio of takeover bids to new listings sits at 27:1. Bodycote and EasyJet both drew competing offers.
This reflects a supply-demand shift — M&A's impact on market structure now exceeds that of equity issuance. Buyers are chasing scarce targets while the float shrinks.
Goldman's investment-banking division published a report titled *Powering the Real Economy with AI*, projecting that "physical AI" will gain market attention in H2. This means → AI is no longer just a cloud-and-compute story; it is spreading into manufacturing, logistics, and energy.
Europe and commodities — where are the overlooked opportunities?
Despite broadly bearish sentiment, Wilson argues European equities have already outperformed expectations.
His core thesis: the AI revolution will upend the old consensus that "demographics is destiny." This means → Europe's ongoing regulatory and fiscal reforms carry more strategic weight in an AI era than the market currently prices.
In commodities, H1's AI-and-energy narrative absorbed most capital, but the case for traditional physical assets is strengthening. Goldman's strategy team highlights a copper market where "physical tightness coexists with weakening macro expectations." In plain terms = physical copper supply is genuinely tight, but the market is too scared of a slowdown to chase it — that mismatch is itself the opportunity.
What is the biggest macro risk?
Wilson names the U.S. midterm elections as H2's most important macro variable; he expects their market impact to rise sharply after summer.
His tenth theme is interest-rate tail risk: at current yield levels, compounded by U.S. political uncertainty, the possibility of a large rate shock cannot be dismissed.
This means → every micro-level positive — AI inflection, strong earnings, hot M&A — must ultimately clear a macro gate: if rates spike on a political shock, no amount of micro-level strength can hold. Whether AI returns keep delivering is the linchpin test of whether micro can keep outrunning macro.
Content is for reference only, not financial advice.