ARK’s Wood predicts a deflationary tech boom, an inverted yield curve that will not lead to an economic recession, and bitcoin will play a more significant role.

Cathie Wood, CIO and portfolio manager of ARK Invest, believes that five converging innovation platforms—artificial intelligence, robotics, energy storage, blockchain, and multiomics—could drive sustainable US productivity growth up to 5% to 6%, far above the 2% to 3% that investors have grown accustomed to since the Industrial Revolution. In her latest letter to investors, Wood points out that the real GDP annual growth rate could exceed 7%. She believes this scenario resembles the fifty-year expansion marked by the “Roaring Twenties,” rather than any other period over the past century.

Wood describes the current environment as a “back to the future” situation: after interest rates plunged to near zero during the COVID shock, they are now rising in a pattern similar to the pre-Federal Reserve era, when short-term rates tracked nominal GDP growth while long-term rates reflected the deflationary undercurrents of technology. During the Industrial Revolution, the probability of yield curve inversion exceeded 60%, but it did not signal a recession. ARK believes that a similar inversion today will be a positive indicator for the stock market, not a warning signal.

Wood writes that the core driving force is the dramatic decline in technology costs. Since the advent of cloud computing and the breakthroughs in deep learning over the past decade, the cost of AI inference has fallen more than 99% annually. The price of whole genome sequencing has dropped from $270 million in 2003 to under $100. This “benign deflation” has already begun to show macroeconomic effects: ARK notes that by 2025, demand for AI inference will grow about 25 times, and estimates that Anthropic’s annualized revenue surged from $9 billion to $65 billion between last December and this July. In ARK’s view, this impressive growth strongly refutes claims of an AI speculation bubble.

Inflation, Oil, and Reasons to Invest in Stocks

Regarding inflation, Wood points out that other data suggest official numbers overstate the problem. In July, the government reported headline and core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) at 3.7% and 3.3% respectively, while the Truflation index, which tracks over 16 million prices daily, showed headline PCE at 2.5% and core PCE at 2.1%, both very close to the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. Wood believes part of the difference comes from energy prices: gasoline prices rose about 33% year-on-year due to the Iran war, but she expects prices will fall sharply once the conflict eases—potentially to $30–$35 per barrel—citing surging output from the UAE and other oil producers exceeding their quota limits.

Wood believes monetary policy reinforces this outlook. With Kevin Warsh becoming Federal Reserve Chair, she expects the Fed will implement Volcker-style monetary discipline, inflation will decline, and as productivity boosts the dollar, gold prices may fall—though she also notes that Bitcoin can serve alongside gold as a tool to hedge counterparty risk in volatile markets.

This outlook is not without risk. If short-term rates rise to 6%–8% as ARK predicts, then roughly $16 trillion in private equity and private credit (most of it financed with floating rate debt) could face severe pressure; meanwhile, in this scenario, federal debt repayments would surge by about $80 billion.

Wood concludes with a call for portfolio reallocation: she believes that the classic 60/40 investment model was fit for the era of falling rates from 1981 to 2021, but a deflationary tech boom requires a higher weighting in equities—particularly in Bitcoin for investors focused on cryptocurrencies.