Valuation worries, record-long government shutdown hang over markets: What to watch this week

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• McDonald's has seen particularly strong growth among higher-income consumers in a challenging environment

  80% confidence

• Fast-casual restaurants are over-indexing on 18- to 24-year-old customers who are facing increasing macroeconomic pressures and are likely to cut back on fast food spending

  80% confidence

• Markets are grappling with the excitement surrounding how impactful and ideally profitable AI technologies could be in the future, tempered by concern that expectations implied by current valuations are too high

  80% confidence

• Chipotle saw a broad-based pullback in frequency across all income cohorts, with the largest loss in two customer groups: those with household incomes under $100,000 per year, and a particularly challenged cohort of 25- to 35-year-olds facing unemployment, increased student loan repayment and slower real wage growth

  80% confidence

• China will win the AI race if Chinese access to Nvidia's top-of-the-line Blackwell chips remains closed, preventing the American company from supplanting Chinese chipmakers

  80% confidence

• OpenAI has commitments of about $1.4 trillion over the next 8 years, which requires continued revenue growth

  80% confidence

• Circular financing between AI companies could be interpreted as a vote of confidence that downstream users will crack the profitability code, or more pessimistically as being used to buttress unprofitable business lines to maintain chip demand

  80% confidence

• China is nanoseconds behind America in AI and it's vital that America wins by racing ahead and winning developers worldwide

  80% confidence