Wall Street’s having a party, Main Street isn’t

Wall Street: confetti cannon, tech edition

If you only glanced at the tape this week, you’d think the market had chugged three espressos and found religion. The S&P 500 kept grinding to new highs, the Nasdaq 100 punched through a fresh milestone, and tech names kept acting like gravity was for other people. Micron ripped, AMD kept stacking gains, and the XLK ETF just put together a six-week run that would make even dot-com-era chart nerds do a double take.

Main Street: absolutely not feeling it

Now for the less cheerful side of the split-screen. The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment reading cratered to 48.2 in May — the lowest in the survey’s nearly 80-year history. That’s not just “people are a little grumpy” territory. That’s “everyday Americans are staring at gas prices, tariffs, and shrinking real income expectations and deciding the vibe is bad” territory.

Why investors should care

The disconnect matters because markets don’t live in a vacuum. A euphoric stock tape can keep running even when households feel squeezed, but that kind of mismatch eventually shows up somewhere — in spending, politics, earnings, or Fed chatter. Today’s stronger-than-expected jobs report offered a tiny morale boost, but it didn’t exactly erase the bigger story: one America is riding the AI rocket, and the other is staring at the gas pump like it owes them money.

Big picture: when Wall Street and Main Street stop agreeing on reality, something’s usually got to give.