Good evening. In today’s newsletter we’re digging into some ripple effects of big moves from Big Tech — on misinformation, on blue-collar jobs and even on the U.S. birth rate. Tech stocks sent Wall Street whipsawing today, but months of AI enthusiasm has kept major indexes at all-time highs. Experts told Marketplace’s Henry Epp it may be time to take those profits and run. — Tony Wagner, newsletter editor

Finding it difficult to avoid the IPO mania gripping Wall Street? Well, things are about to get worse.

Anthropic and SpaceX already both filed to go public, and now OpenAI has set the wheels in motion for its own stock offering in the coming months.

All three potential trillion-dollar companies have picked what seems like a pretty good time to join those markets. Over the past year, the S&P 500, for instance, has gained more than 20%.

But investors got a very different message late last week from Bank of America (which is a Marketplace underwriter): There are “too many red flags” pointing to a market peak, according to the report, so it's time to “take profits.”

Stock market analysts don’t really speak in plain English. So when they recommend investors take profits, “they’re really telling people to sell, but they’re trying to do it in sort of a market-etiquette way,” said James Weston, a finance professor at Rice University Business School.

Bank of America analysts offered a couple reasons why now might be time to sell in the report. (The bank declined an interview request from Marketplace.)

For one, there are concerning signs in the “real” economy, Weston said.

“We're seeing worsening fundamentals in consumer spending, we're seeing worsening fundamentals in consumer indebtedness, we're seeing a big rise in the price of oil,” he said.

Second, the value of publicly traded companies is really high right now — especially tech companies.

“When we talk about valuations of companies, we usually measure it based on the price of the company to their earnings, and right now that's at a very high point,” said Derek Horstmeyer, a professor of finance at George Mason University.

Some tech company shares are really expensive, given how much revenue they actually generate. That could mean investors are being overly speculative, or that the market is near its peak.

The problem with analysts calling on investors to “take profits” is it's really hard to get right, said Ben Carlson, director of institutional asset management at Ritholz Wealth Management.

“There have been people who've been trying to call the top on this for 10 years now,” he said.

That quote, with all its colloquial rhythms, was attributed to Broussard’s writing in a recent book. But it was actually something Broussard said on our show, “Marketplace Tech,” in 2023. Ironically, the AI writing tool that helped pull together a book about AI and truth… misrepresented the truth behind Broussard’s statement.

“Marketplace Tech” had Broussard, a critical AI scholar, back on the show today to talk about the flap. It’s emblematic of AI’s shortcomings, she said, and why not enough people understand them.

Why did birth rates start declining in 2007? A new paper argues the iPhone’s launch that same year was not a coincidence. Researchers looked at areas where the device was more widely available sooner and found birth rates dropped faster there. Americans were less likely to take that step, the thinking goes, as the social isolation of the smartphone era arrived.

Phones aren’t the only thing keeping families from starting of course, but economists and politicians are looking for answers because a reproduction problem can become an existential economic problem really fast. Not for nothing, kids are expensive; check out the latest numbers in your state.