BlockBeats News, May 30th – In its latest report, Bank of America Securities pointed out that the rare deviation between global stock market highs and corporate earnings expectations has strayed from traditional macroeconomic fundamentals. The MSCI Global Index's 12-month forward EPS has risen by 9% in the past three months, with an annualized growth rate of nearly 40%. The S&P 500's three-month EPS momentum has surged to 12%, reaching a 40-year high. However, the global PMI has continued to decline to a two-year low of around 50.5. More importantly, about two-thirds of this earnings upgrade comes from the expansion of profit margin expectations, with Europe and the global 12-month forward consensus profit margins reaching historical peaks of 13.9% and 11.4%, respectively. Bank of America likened this anomaly to China's accession to the WTO in 2001—when over a billion workers joining the global economy weakened the bargaining power of workers in developed countries, driving the after-tax corporate profits as a percentage of GDP from 5%-8% to 10%-12%; today, the market is betting that the large-scale deployment of AI tools will similarly impact the bargaining power of white-collar workers, leading to a structural leap in corporate profit margins, even in the current environment lacking macro acceleration.

Bank of America listed five major market-underestimated risks in the report: macroeconomic downturn, endogenous demand contraction triggered by AI substitution, the cost of using large-model tokens has doubled since the beginning of the year, productivity improvements may take a decade to materialize rather than an immediate realization, and mass white-collar unemployment could provoke political backlash and windfall profit tax pressure. The market is currently pricing in the almost ideal scenario of "no demand worries, record profit margins." If the macro downturn and widening risk premium materialize, the current profit-driven logic will face a dual test of profit margin expectation revisions and valuation compression.