JPM｜Marissa’s Macro Musings: Cracks in the Facade: When Distillates, DeepSeek Disciples, and Data Centers Collide

Research evidence excerpt

JPM｜Marissa’s Macro Musings: Cracks in the Facade: When Distillates, DeepSeek Disciples, and Data Centers Collide

Specialist Sales

US Specialist Sales J P M O R G A N

20 July 2026

JPM | Marissa’s Macro Musings - Cracks in the Facade: When

Distillates, DeepSeek Disciples, and Data Centers Collide

Marissa Gitler

+1 212 622 2934

marissa.gitler@jpmorgan.com

US Thematics focuses on key macro views, market debates, and favored investment themes.

Market Dynamics of Note:

Oil & Products Risk Is Underpriced Relative to Equity Complacency: Despite a confluence of supply-side shocks, crude

is barely moving while equities remain buoyant on backward-looking CPI/PPI relief. Distillate crack spreads surging toward

record highs signals the shock is morphing into a refining bottleneck story, which has more persistent, broad-based

inflationary pass-through than a crude spike alone.

AI Capex Cycle Is the Dominant Macro Factor, But Concentration Risk Is Bifurcated: The Kimi K3/Qwen disruption

fear was quickly absorbed in the US due to compute dependency on NVIDIA’s ecosystem, but the Korea margin call episode

(1.2M accounts, 340K wiped out) is a stark reminder of what concentrated AI exposure looks like without rotation flexibility.

In the US, momentum factor drawdown (~25% off June highs for JPPQMO) is occurring within a resilient index as capital

rotates rather than exits. This is a factor-level risk, not a systemic one, yet. GOOGL earnings Wednesday are critical:

hyperscaler CAPEX guidance ($325-350B investor expectation vs. ~$250B Street for 2027) will set the tone for whether the

AI infrastructure trade re-accelerates or faces a valuation reset.

AI ROI Dependency as a Systemic Equity Risk(?): The financials earnings read-through indicates that AI has graduated