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Frank O’Hara and the end of the ‘American Century’

The poet and curator was at the forefront of US efforts to project its high art as forcefully as its military might abroad — an idea that now looks dead

Frank O’Hara was born on March 27 1926. For much of his life, however, he celebrated his birthday on the wrong day. O’Hara was born into an emotionally complicated household in Massachusetts, to parents who were overwhelmed by Catholic guilt about sex before marriage and decided that a later date, June 27, would be for the best.

The mistake has a certain irony for a poet famous for his attentiveness to the marking of occasions both special and ordinary: birthdays, deaths, homecoming parties, farewell lunches, weddings, rendezvous kept and missed, a jazz concert at the Five Spot and a performance at the New York City Ballet. Even brunch (especially brunch). In one of his best-known “I do this, I do that” poems, “The Day Lady Died”, a shoeshine is pinned to an exact moment: “It is 12:20 in New York a Friday/three days after Bastille Day, yes/it is 1959”. The lines carry the echo of the French Revolution; as if private time were always brushing up against historical time, as if any day might contain the possibility of dramatic change or self-reinvention.

However we reckon the date of his birth, this year marks O’Hara’s centenary. His fixation on the present moment, “beautiful, and interesting, and modern”, was not merely temperamental.

It belonged to a wider atmosphere in which American life was accelerating, as the country began to imagine its culture in outward-facing terms — a nation projecting its high art as forcefully as its military might abroad. In 1941, the publishing magnate Henry Luce had termed this confident, expansive vision the “American Century”.

Today, at a moment when it feels as though those ideas are in decline, O’Hara’s work returns us to that atmosphere of charged immediacy. To read him now is to see how differently we live, as the openness of his America gives way to a more inward 21st-century culture, shaped by digital mediation and a waning belief in the soft power of art to serve US interests overseas.

O’Hara was one of the leading lights of the poetry scene in mid-century New York. He moved in the orbit of the abstract expressionist painters, but he had a more complicated history. After serving as a sonarman for the US Navy in the Pacific, he entered Harvard University on the GI Bill and met the poet John Ashbery, who encouraged him to move to New York in 1951. There, O’Hara became an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and a familiar presence in the lofts and studios of New York’s artists, inspiring portraits by Alex Katz, Alice Neel and Elaine de Kooning.

The 1950s were a time of cold war tensions abroad and postwar prosperity at home. McCarthyism had coaxed a national paranoia into public life, stifling dissent and chilling political discourse in the process. Against that climate of suspicion, O’Hara and his artistic circle pushed back, celebrating intimacy, friendship and the ordinary textures of the city, refusing the era’s pressures to declare and conform. In the years before the 1969 Stonewall riots, when police could arrest people for wearing fewer than three articles of clothing deemed appropriate to their sex, O’Hara’s open homosexuality was itself a quiet form of defiance. He fell in love often and exuberantly, most deeply with the Canadian ballet dancer Vincent Warren, whose beautiful sense of movement O’Hara once claimed made the works of Leonardo, Michelangelo and the impressionists entirely dispensable.

Instead of politics or religion (he had quickly abandoned his youthful Catholicism, which he later described as “at best an oversolemn introduction to cosmic entertainment”), O’Hara placed his faith in painting, and in the metropolitan pleasures of New York. “In a capitalist country,” he once remarked, “fun is everything.” If poets of another age had sought idyllic pastures far from the city’s corrupting distractions and grime, O’Hara’s poems embraced what Ashbery called his “creatively messy New York environment” with its “scent of garbage, patchouli, and carbon monoxide” — and its endless possibilities. “One need never leave the confines of New York,” O’Hara reflected in his prose-poem “Meditations in an Emergency”, “to get all the greenery one wishes — I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.”

This is pure O’Hara: regret, usually a backward-looking feeling, becomes a spur to live fully in the present. He was “a priest who got into a different business”, recalled Katz who, in 1960, completed a nearly life-sized portrait of his friend: “Even on his sixth martini, second pack of cigarettes and while calling a friend ‘a bag of shit’, and roaring off into the night, Frank’s business was being an active intellectual . . . He was out to improve the world whether we liked it or not . . . the frightening amount of energy he invested in our art, and our lives often made me feel like a miser.” And, in that regard, he personified the spirit of the age.

Something else was happening in Manhattan in the 1950s. The city was undergoing a decisive shift in cultural gravity, as the meridian of modern art, long anchored in Paris, moved across the Atlantic. Critics and collectors came to see the work of the abstract expressionists, or the “New York School”, as somehow embodying the pressures and possibilities of American life. Their paintings were positioned as the antithesis of the doctrinaire socialist realism sanctioned by the Soviet Union. Where Soviet art sought heroic images of workers and party leaders, the mural-scale canvases of the New York painters could be presented as the product of artistic individualism: improvised, resistant to centralised control and marked by an anxiety that could only arise where artists were left to choose for themselves.

The movement’s emphasis on personal expression and freedom came to stand, however imperfectly, for the values of American democracy.

If the US was going to win the cold war, it would need to demonstrate that it possessed an advanced culture of its own, not merely the capacity to furnish Europeans with affordable washing machines. Abstract expressionism was presented as a distinctly modern American art — one capable of speaking back to Europe on equal terms.

The American critic Eve Cockroft put it like this: “It is ironic but not contradictory that in a society . . . in which political repression weighed as heavily as it did in the United States, Abstract Expressionism was for many the expression of freedom . . . of artists completely without fetters.”

MoMA positioned itself at the centre of this new world. In July 1952, Nelson Rockefeller, the museum’s chairman, established an International Program to promote American modern art abroad. Rockefeller, who moved effortlessly through the revolving doors of culture, politics and finance, and would later become governor of New York, was the son of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, one of the three “adamantine ladies” who had founded the museum in 1929. Both New York men of wealth and appetite, Rockefeller and President Donald Trump could not be more different in their cultural instincts: Rockefeller believed art conferred legitimacy on power; Trump believes power confers legitimacy on everything, art included.

Rockefeller conceived the initiative as both a cultural undertaking and an instrument shaped by cold war politics. For its champions and critics, the International Program was a “Marshall Plan in the field of ideas”.

It was into this new world of art and international ambition that O’Hara would step, moving easily between cramped downtown studios and the more formal channels of cultural diplomacy.

In 1951, as a 25-year-old, O’Hara had arrived in Manhattan at just the right time. The triangle of blocks below 14th Street, stretching from the Lower East Side across Greenwich Village to the waterfront bars of the West Village, was a romantic enclave of cheap digs in which the penniless avant-garde stayed warm with “tomato soup” made from free hot water and ketchup at the Waldorf Cafeteria — and made the first great paintings in American modern art. On many nights at the Cedar Tavern on University Place, one could find Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell arguing loudly over whiskey and beer beneath the bar’s dim lights.

Modern poets tended to have rather boring day jobs. T S Eliot was a bank clerk who spent his late twenties shuffling paperwork in the foreign transactions department at Lloyds Bank; Wallace Stevens merrily slogged through 40 years as an executive in the suburban Connecticut insurance industry; Philip Larkin was a librarian in Hull. O’Hara, by contrast, worked at MoMA just as New York was becoming the capital of modern art, shepherding major acquisitions and writing catalogue essays that helped define some of the most radical art of his time.

O’Hara’s swift ascent through the ranks of MoMA would today make any professional curator, armed with specialised degrees in art history, wince. Having started out selling postcards on the front desk in 1951 (he got the job so that he could see a Henri Matisse retrospective every day for free), O’Hara left the museum in 1953 for a couple of years to write criticism for Art News before returning to a plum curatorial position in 1955. Walter Rasmussen, a close friend and MoMA colleague, noted that he was soon “under suspicion as a gifted amateur”, with his “very closeness to the artists . . . questioned as a danger to critical objectivity”.

Championing these artists was a plucky generation of exiled dealers and entrepreneurial gallerists, such as Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons, but the abstract expressionists’ success was also the product of a new postwar order. As American capitalism expanded, the New York art scene did too. For the Trotskyite critic turned militant anti-communist Clement Greenberg, the self-appointed flag-bearer of the abstract expressionists, the implications were clear. The “main premises of western art”, he announced, had at last “migrated to the United States, along with the center of gravity of industrial production and political power”.

Manhattan was becoming the future and now its painters had a new kind of art to match. By 1949, Luce’s Life magazine was asking whether Pollock might be “the greatest living painter in the United States”. Two years later, society photographer Cecil Beaton staged a Vogue photo shoot for Dior in front of Pollock’s “drip” paintings. What had begun as the unruly energy of downtown bohemia was quickly absorbed into the circuits of fashion, media and money that defined the new cultural capital.

O’Hara worked within this emerging nexus of art and political and economic power, even as his instincts pulled in another direction. Much of his work for MoMA — especially after he joined the International Program in 1955 — took place overseas, drawing him into the murky, clandestine world of cold war cultural politics. The same art that circulated through the bars and studios below 14th Street was to be enlisted in a wider campaign of cultural projection.

With Dorothy Miller, O’Hara co-curated The New American Painting, a 1958-59 landmark exhibition of 81 works by 17 abstract expressionists that travelled to major European cities. In London, the show drew the highest-paying attendance in the history of the Arts Council’s exhibitions at the Tate Gallery. Nevile Wallis of The Observer argued that American painters had found forms equal to an era of dread and technological upheaval, their canvases “clearly attuned to the phenomena of our time” and charged with a “mysterious and universal import”. In 1958, O’Hara co-curated the American Pavilion at the Venice Biennale — the art world’s Olympics — where Mark Tobey became the first American since James McNeill Whistler in 1895 to win the International Prize for Painting.

Today, the Pavilion remains a site of national self-imagination but just duller. Last week, I saw the relatively little-known sculptor Alma Allen’s display at the 2026 Biennale: works that might not be gaudy-neoclassical enough for Mar-a-Lago but would be happily at home in an anonymous lobby of one of Trump’s more provincial hotels — Pine Hill, New Jersey, for instance. Recent funding cuts and the withdrawal of support for cultural programmes under the Trump administration have underscored that belief in art and ideas as instruments of American soft power is waning. In March 2025, following Elon Musk’s dismissal of the international broadcaster Voice of America as a “relic of the past” that “nobody listens to” any more, Trump ordered the US Agency for Global Media — the body that oversees VOA — to be reduced to the minimum level required by law. What resulted was not simply a diminished US cultural presence abroad, but a nation less certain of the value of projecting one at all. A US federal judge subsequently ruled that the effective shutdown violated the Administrative Procedure Act, ordering the agency’s operations, staffing and broadcasting activities to be fully restored.

O’Hara was not a very political person — or at least he liked to seem that way. Even during the activist decade of the 1960s, and as a close friend of figures like Allen Ginsberg, he found loud ideological declarations gauche and preferred the freedom to change his mind. Yet he was a progressive at heart and a life-long anti-fascist ever since he resented being made to pray for Franco’s success in grade school.

He never doubted the abstract expressionists’ bona fides or their authenticity. For him, it was inconceivable that their work would serve merely as window-dressing or chic decoration for Upper West Side penthouses. It was raw and real, built from the residue of everyday life. In an uncertain and anxious moment in American history, their painting offered a model of commitment that he found irresistible. This conviction is evident in his 1959 monograph on Pollock — the first devoted to the artist — published in the same year that O’Hara organised Pollock’s memorial retrospective at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris. (Pollock had died three years earlier in a drunken car crash in Springs, Long Island.)

In the book, O’Hara lingers over Pollock’s “classical period”, pausing before the painting “Full Fathom Five”, with its familiar drips and splattered paint marks — the “linear trailings of black, flowery-white and aluminum” that have come to stand for Pollock’s brief but monumental achievement. Yet O’Hara looked closer, attending less to the gesture than to the debris caught on the surface: “a number of extraneous objects . . . like souvenirs of accident: a cigarette, half its paper torn off to expose the tobacco, two keys, nails, a cluster of tacks, and paint-tube tops making little blind eyes here and there”. For O’Hara, these fragments registered the contingencies of making itself, the small physical traces of a struggle between accident and intuitive decision-making. It was these qualities that he sought to cultivate in his poetry. Pollock, he concluded, exemplified “the affirmation of an artist who was totally conscious of risk, defeat and triumph. He lived the first, defied the second and achieved the last.”

Now a 30-year-old, and allegedly a day after Pollock’s funeral, O’Hara wrote “A Step Away from Them”, a poem that records a frenetic carousel of images captured on his break from the museum: “It’s my lunch hour, so I go/for a walk among the hum-colored/cabs . . .” before reaching Times Square “where the sign/blows smoke over my head”.

As O’Hara moved through the city streets, the plentiful distractions of a consumerist metropolis — a cheeseburger on the corner, neon in daylight, magazines with nudes, more cigarettes — unfolds with the quickened sense of attention that would become his signature style. Yet beneath the poem’s buoyant surface runs a quieter awareness of mortality. Pollock’s death shadows the walk, briefly surfacing in a passing line before dissolving again into the flow of the afternoon.

Many of O’Hara’s poems read less like escapes from work than dispatches from inside it. In the poem “Radio”, O’Hara bemoans a working week of trudging “fatiguingly/from desk to desk in the museum”, but his Saturday afternoon is redeemed by listening to classical music and having “my beautiful de Kooning” — the painting “Summer Couch”, which O’Hara owned and hung on the wall of his apartment at 326 East 49th Street — to “aspire to”. Spending time with paintings was a busman’s holiday for him, and that was the way he liked it. While some museum bureaucracy was unavoidable, he succeeded in his position because, as his friend the critic Irving Sandler put it, “What was really important about his public role was that it augmented his private role, that of the friend of the artists.”

It was O’Hara’s own death in 1966 that prevented him from curating the first major survey of de Kooning at MoMA. The Rotterdam-born painter, who had arrived in New York as a stowaway in 1926, believed O’Hara was the only American he could trust to undertake the project.

O’Hara died at the age of 40, in July 1966, after a 23-year-old accidentally careered a White Cap Taxi Company jeep into him on a Fire Island beach in the early hours after a party. At his funeral, Larry Rivers — painter, jazz saxophonist and notorious philanderer — gave the eulogy for his longtime collaborator and one-time lover. He declared: “Frank O’Hara was my best friend. There are at least 60 people in New York who thought Frank O’Hara was their best friend.” The poet’s absence left a noticeable gap in postwar American culture: few figures had moved so easily between the studio, the museum, the poem and the street.

O’Hara’s most enduring advice for anyone looking to art for guidance amid the confusions of the present can be found in his 1964 interview with David Smith on the TV series Art: New York, in which he reflects on the sculptor’s wrought iron and stainless steel works. For O’Hara, they were not merely objects to be admired but occasions for a certain discipline of attention — a reminder that the seriousness of art lies in the alertness it demands from those who encounter it.

As he commented: “They present a total attention, and they are telling you that that is the way to be: on guard. In a sense, they are benign, because they offer themselves for your pleasure. But beneath that kindness is a warning: don’t be bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial, and don’t be proud. The slightest loss of attention leads to death.”

More than 60 years later, the warning has acquired a different kind of edge. The America O’Hara moved through — anxious and conformist but still convinced that its culture was something worth sending into the world — has given way to one less certain of that proposition. Rockefeller’s International Program, the American Pavilion at Venice, The New American Painting at the Tate: all were expressions of a belief, however cynically administered, that the US had something to say, and that painting was one way of saying it. The apparatus still exists, just about. But the vision that once sustained a programme of American high art abroad is being dismantled with conviction, not disinterested neglect. The imagery America now projects most fluently is AI-generated: optimised, authorless — the president rendered as Christ healing the sick.

O’Hara’s poems were only accidentally interested in America as an idea — they were actively concerned with what the people he loved did on a Friday lunchtime before the long weekend. But that insistence on the local and the particular was itself a form of political argument: here was an art rooted in individual freedom, in the unglamorous ecstasy of the present moment. It was an art whose every impulse was towards the immediate rather than the instrumental.

His poems capture the passing of hours and the conditions under which those hours are lived: the pressures of conformity, the allure of freedom, the small, stubborn acts of attention through which a life takes shape. In an age where experience is parcelled out through screens, artificial intelligence and algorithms, O’Hara’s commitment to marking the energy of the moment — to all those lunch breaks, paintings, friends and chance encounters — carries an unexpectedly political charge. It locates culture not in what a nation chooses to project, or not, abroad, but in what can be seen, felt and shared within the fabric of everyday life. He was born, officially, on the wrong day. He spent his life making the right one matter.

The French far-right could dynamite the relationships fundamental to the European project

We will find out which far-right candidate on July 7, when a Paris court rules on the appeal brought by Marine Le Pen, parliamentary leader of the Rassemblement National party, against her conviction for fraud, which came with a five-year ban on holding elected office. 

Le Pen has said she will hand the baton to party president Jordan Bardella if she loses her appeal. Her chances of overturning the sentence or drastically reducing the disqualification from office appear slim, given the evidence against her in the case. 

Theoretically, if she persisted with her candidacy, while still banned, it would in effect trigger a further review by the Constitutional Council, France’s highest court on electoral matters, of her right to run. The risk is if she lost that appeal, the RN would be forced to switch horses perilously late in the race. 

There’s a long way to April’s first round election, but whether it is Le Pen or Bardella, the RN looks all but assured of coming comfortably first on 32-35 per cent, according to an Elabe poll in late March.

Meanwhile, as my colleague Leila Abboud explains, there is an usually crowded field of potential runners and riders on the political centre ground including in Macron’s camp. Unless they can coalesce in the coming months, the chances of a far right victory will only grow.

For all these reasons, Bardella’s moves and utterances are attracting closer scrutiny in European capitals. In an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung this week, Bardella promised friendship and co-operation with Germany if elected. There was room for co-operation with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on cutting business regulation, watering down the EU’s green deal and clamping down on immigration, he said. 

These are issues where Merz has already found common cause with Italy’s rightwing prime minister Giorgia Meloni. The echo with Meloni seems deliberate: Bardella would like to be seen as similarly sensible and pragmatic, working with like-minded rightwing leaders to change the EU from the inside.

In reality, Bardella would be anything but, as his FAZ interview underscored. If he was president, France would unilaterally pull out of EU asylum and immigration policy and disregard its legal obligations under EU law in this field. It would also rip up EU rules on electricity market pricing.

The RN would also pull France out of Nato’s integrated military command once Russia’s war against Ukraine is over. To be sure, this would be reverting to the country’s position within the alliance from 1966 to 2009. But US disengagement from Nato under Donald Trump has changed the context dramatically. For Europeans, there is no real alternative than pulling together more closely to “Europeanise” Nato. France and the UK are leading those efforts.

In contrast to Bardella, Meloni has remained fully committed to the Atlantic alliance and has stuck studiously to Italy’s EU obligations, although recent proposals from Rome to change electricity pricing may well fall foul of the bloc’s rules. 

If cherry picking EU policies was not bad enough, two other Bardella proposals would go down particularly badly in Berlin (neither of them, funnily enough, cropped up in his interview with the German daily). The RN wants to unilaterally cut billions from the French contribution to the EU budget, an affront to Germany which has long been the EU’s paymaster and will balk at having to pay more because of Paris. Bardella has also floated the idea, radioactive in Germany, of the European Central Bank monetising French debt.

Policies like these would put Paris on a collision course with Berlin, not just with the EU institutions, dynamiting a Franco-German relationship that for all its tensions and limitations has been fundamental to the European project. 

The German political establishment is already reeling from its estrangement from the US, so the “idea that they lose the axis with Paris, that’s a double blow”, says the senior EU policymaker.

The French far-right threat has been hanging over Europe for a long time, said a senior European diplomat, but the damage would be greater now given a dearth of leadership elsewhere in the bloc, including in Berlin. EU officials are sceptical that Merz and Meloni, despite their conservative kinship, could form a replacement for the Franco-German engine.

“If you have a rather dysfunctional German government and a populist rightwing French government opposed to new proposals coming from Brussels, the EU would become even more dysfunctional than it is now,” the diplomat said.

Sarah White examines the le Total bashing gripping France, a proxy for suspicion of capitalism in populist times.

Paola Tamma and Barbara Moens look at what would happen to tech services in Europe if the US pulled a killed switch.

Even as tech surges, many other sectors in the market are trading at surprisingly attractive prices.

Key Points

Aside from technology, a roaring bull market this isn’t.

Several key sectors—financials, healthcare, and consumer staples—are trading below their early-year highs. The S&P 500 index’s 10% rise so far this year has been driven by a 25% rise in the tech sector.

With an effective weighting of about 50% in the index, tech is so dominant now that it can power the market even if other sectors are in the red, as healthcare and financials are this year.

“If you’re not a chip company or building data centers, you’re out of luck,” says Michael Jamison, managing partner at Griffin Asset Management.

One sign of the malaise outside tech is that many blue-chip stocks have been hitting 52-week lows lately. Barron’s identified 10 quality stocks that hit the new-lows list in the past week. Many carry 3%-plus dividend yields.

Let’s start with the king of home improvement.

“I know Home Depot is out of favor, but its scale is enormous,” says Jamison, a fan of the stock and its 3% dividend yield. There are few more dominant retailers.

Investors are worried about depressed home-building and remodeling activity, and the recent uptick in interest rates doesn’t help. The stock is down almost 20% in the past year, to $304, and trades for about 20 times estimated 2026 earnings. When housing perks up, Home Depot should rally.

As the leader in animal health, Zoetis once was viewed as a can’t-miss play on Americans’ infatuation with pets. But pet-oriented medical spending unexpectedly slowed, and Zoetis has been hammered. The stock, at around $75, is off 40% this year and 70% from its 2021 peak.

Morgan Stanley analyst Erin Wright is bullish on the stock, citing the “unmatched breadth” of the Zoetis portfolio.

The stock now trades for about 11 times projected 2026 earnings and yields almost 3%. Zoetis isn’t broken. It’s still capable of high-single-digit annual earnings growth, and there have been recent purchases by company insiders.

Accenture, the consulting and outsourcing leader, keeps telling investors that AI won’t disrupt its business, but Wall Street fears the worst, and the stock keeps dropping.

Accenture shares, at $164, are down nearly 40% this year and trade for under 12 times projected earnings for its fiscal year ending in August. It has a 4% dividend yield and has been making ample stock buybacks, which could eventually lift the share price.

A consulting initiative from OpenAI has rattled the stock lately. UBS analyst Kevin McVeigh remains bullish, noting that Accenture has the scale, “deployment capability,” and skills that upstart AI players lack. He has a Buy rating and an admittedly ambitious $320 price target.

Marsh, a leader in the property-and-casualty insurance brokerage industry, long commanded a premium valuation of over 20 times earnings as a “capital light” way to play insurance industry growth without taking underwriting risk.

Shares of Marsh and other insurance brokers have been hit for two reasons: a potential AI threat to brokerage and consulting services, and a more competitive P&C pricing environment, which is dampening revenue growth. The AI threat to the brokerage business seems overblown given the complexity of corporate insurance needs.

Marsh stock, at $160, is down 28% over the past year and now trades for 15 times projected 2026 earnings. UBS analyst Brian Meredith has a Buy rating and $235 price target, citing a resilient business model and ample capital returns.

In a K-shaped economy driven by affluent Americans, McDonald’s reliance on lower-income consumers hurting from high gasoline prices worries Wall Street.

The stock, at around $275, trades for around 20 times earnings and yields almost 3%.

“We believe risk/reward for MCD shares is attractive despite near-term pressures, given catalysts with potential to drive market share gains & strengthen U.S. sales growth, and defensive characteristics,” wrote UBS analyst Dennis Geiger in a recent client note.

Wall Street hates McCormick’s deal in March to buy the larger Unilever food business. Investors fear McCormick is overpaying, taking on too much debt, and diluting one of the better food franchises, which had been focused on spices and flavorings.

The damage to McCormick stock could be over with the shares off 31% this year to around $46. TD Cowen analyst Robert Moskow is bullish, arguing that Unilever has good brands like Hellmann’s and gives McCormick greater exposure to higher-growth emerging markets.

The stock now trades for about 15 times projected 2026 earnings—half the multiple of three years ago—and yields 4%.

Republic Services is No. 2 nationally behind Waste Management in garbage collection and recycling. It has a steady growth business with a competitive moat in scarce landfills, annuity-like revenue, and 90%-plus annual customer retention.

This year’s earning growth is expected to be subpar at around 4% but accelerating to nearly 10% in 2027. The stock, at about $208, has an above-market multiple at 28 times projected 2026 earnings. Garbage is a good business, and Republic stock is rarely cheap.

Abbott Laboratories used to be one of the most reliable big companies in the healthcare sector.

That changed this year. First-quarter results showed a decline in its infant formula business, and there was a cut to 2026 earnings guidance related to Abbott’s pricey purchase of Exact Sciences, a maker of a colon cancer diagnostic test.

The stock now looks appealing after falling 32% this year to $85. It trades for 15 times projected 2026 earnings—down from a price/earnings ratio of 25 a year ago—and yields 3%. UBS’s Priya Sachdeva is bullish, citing “the resiliency of ABT’s diversified portfolio.” The company could get back to 10%-plus earnings growth in 2027.

Medtronic, a leader in medical devices, has seen its stock fall 20% this year to around $77 and is no higher than it was a decade ago.

The potential negative impact of GLP-1 drugs on knee and hip replacements, on top of tariffs, has depressed the medical-devices sector this year. Medtronic’s business, however, is focused on GLP-1 resistant cardiology and neurology.

The stock looks inexpensive, trading for 13 times earnings in its fiscal year ending in April 2027 and yielding 3.7%. Profit growth is expected to accelerate to about 10% next fiscal year from 2% in the current one.

Danaher offers medical diagnostic products and equipment used in the biotech industry.

Those are strong end markets, but the stock is down 28% this year, to $164, as investors reacted to weak core sales growth of just 1% in the first quarter. The company has a high-single-digit long-term annual revenue target. The stock now trades for 20 times 2026 earnings. Danaher’s earnings per share are expected to rise about 8% this year and in 2027, with the company targeting double-digit long-term growth.

Quantum computing may soon take off. Are the pure plays ready to go the distance?

Key Points

Quantum computing has graduated from a theoretical curiosity to a stock market phenomenon. The sector’s shares routinely post some of the biggest moves in the market, up and down, as investors place their bets on the future of computing.

Quantum computers, offshoots of quantum mechanics, can explore multiple solutions at once, and promise the kind of processing power that could revolutionize medicine, materials science, and other fields.

The technology is unquestionably tricky for investors. The pure-play stocks—the shares of companies that concentrate their efforts wholly on quantum computing—trade mostly on sentiment, since none of the companies have yet to turn a profit. Most are burning cash as they develop products.

The performance of the stocks has been all over the map. D-Wave Quantum last year more than tripled and Rigetti Computing

rose 45%, handily outstripping a 20% gain for the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100. IonQ rose just 7.4%, while Quantum Computing lost 38%. Such varied outcomes suggest idiosyncratic stories, rather than industry tides, are dictating the winners and losers.

Valuations tell a tale of two worlds. IBM, a tech mainstay with a robust quantum effort, is trading at a measured 2.9 times forward sales. Hype has pushed Rigetti Computing and D-Wave to price-to-sales ratios of 746 and 268, respectively.

Numbers like that aren’t for the faint of heart. But by many accounts, the industry is about to take off. Barclays anticipates that quantum systems will achieve a definitive edge over traditional computers by 2027, provided their capabilities hold up under intense technical scrutiny. Estimates from McKinsey project the market will grow to anywhere from $43 billion to $72 billion by 2035.

As the future of quantum computing starts to take shape, there are plenty of ways to play it. Here are six stocks worth considering.

IonQ: This is the largest publicly traded pure play by market capitalization—and one of the boldest. CEO Niccolo de Masi famously referred to the company as the “Nvidia player” of quantum. Last year, the company became the first quantum company to surpass $100 million in annual revenue under generally accepted accounting principles. First-quarter earnings further demonstrated its growth, as IonQ reported a narrower-than-anticipated loss and a sharp spike in contracted backlog, a clear sign of accelerating demand.

D-Wave Quantum: The company has cornered the market for “annealing quantum,” an approach tailored to optimization tasks like logistics and data sampling. However, D-Wave is targeting the launch of a superconducting “gate model” system this year. This more versatile approach uses ultracold electrical circuits to store data, and timed pulses of microwave energy to perform calculations. Revenue fell 81% in the first quarter due to a system sale in the prior year, but Jefferies’ Kevin Garrigan noted that “the underlying momentum remains.” D-Wave posted record bookings and increased its system sales from one a year to two or three.

Rigetti Computing: After a monthslong delay, Rigetti released its largest quantum system to date in April. The company is taking time to refine its technology before scaling to bigger systems, which has led to several readjustments of its timelines. To reduce its dependency on research and development contracts from U.S. government agencies, Rigetti is prioritizing sales of its machines. The company sold a 9-qubit Novera processor to a Canadian university in March, just months after an $8.4 million sale to a research institution in India.

IBM: As a cornerstone of the quantum ecosystem, Big Blue offers cloud-based access to its vast quantum fleet and maintains Qiskit, an open-source development kit enabling users to build quantum computing programs. Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring tells Barron’s the market is likely “discounting or underwriting some degree of quantum in the stock price.” While IBM’s scale and diversification usually reduce volatility, shares popped when the company unveiled its road map to achieve fault-tolerant quantum supercomputing by 2029.

Xanadu Quantum Technologies: Less than two months after its U.S. trading debut, Xanadu stock cratered when the company filed a prospectus allowing shareholders to register their stock for sale. The selloff reflected market anxiety over an increase in shares rather than perceived flaws in the business itself. Xanadu is betting on photonic quantum computing, which uses light particles to carry and process information. This model can operate at room temperature, potentially offering a faster route to stable, large-scale systems. Revenue increased fourfold in the latest quarter, with Xanadu citing continued adoption of its popular software platform, PennyLane.

Quantum Computing: This company is no stranger to uncertainty, given that it spent months searching for a permanent CEO before promoting Yuping Huang in January. The company has faced scrutiny from short sellers who claim it fabricated revenue and misled investors about its quantum chip foundry. To date, Quantum Computing hasn’t acknowledged these claims. First-quarter earnings may have shifted sentiment, as shares jumped 16% despite mixed results. The company has signaled its intentions to scale its presence in quantum communications and photonics through recent acquisitions of Luminar Semiconductor and NuCrypt.:

Nvidia trades at a discount to other semiconductors and can gain 50% from here.

Key Points

Yes, a $5 trillion company trading at an all-time high can be cheap. It’s an opportunity for investors to earn 50% while the company’s market capitalization marches toward $8 trillion.

This, of course, is about Nvidia, the artificial-intelligence chip giant that has transformed the stock market and may be on its way to transforming the entire U.S. economy.

As CEO Jensen Huang accompanies President Donald Trump on his state visit to China and Nvidia prepares to report earnings after the close on May 20, the company is on the cusp of earning more than $190 billion in calendar year 2026. That would be the best year for any corporation ever, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Saudi Aramco, which earned about $160 billion in 2022, holds the current record.

Against that setup, how could Nvidia be cheap? For that matter, how could things get even better for the maker of graphics processing units?

For starters, the stock trades for about 24 times earnings expected over the coming 12 months, a 25% discount to its historical value and 5% below the PHLX Semiconductor Index, which includes Advanced Micro Devices, Micron Technology, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, Intel, and others. Nvidia, as a fast-growing leader, typically trades at a 40% premium to the index.

Since the start of 2025, Nvidia has trailed the index by more than 70 percentage points. Seventy. The market has suddenly forgotten about Nvidia while going gaga over central processing units, or CPUs; memory; and application-specific chips such as Alphabet’s TPUs.

But if demand for semiconductors has exploded—as the earnings and stock performance of countless semiconductor companies imply—is Nvidia stock really going to be left in the dust? No, and the thesis for buying Nvidia here is quite simple. Investors really just need to believe one thing: This isn’t yet as good as it gets for AI computing.

There are several reasons to believe just that.

For starters, look at the earnings reports of countless companies in the semiconductor value chain. “We’re still in the early days of the AI infrastructure growth,” Jon Kemp, CEO of semiconductor materials supplier Qnity Electronics, tells Barron’s, adding that the growth is moving from the data center to edge computing and physical AI applications. “Wherever people are located…the proliferation of [AI] beyond data centers into every other part of the industrial economy is one of the things that gives us confidence in the durability of the growth cycle.”

Strange as it may sound, AI applications still haven’t achieved widespread use. Just 20% of smartphone users have used an AI agent application on their phones, according to ARK Investment Management’s chief futurist Brett Winton. That number will be approaching 100% in three years. That makes 2026 more like 1996 rather than 1999, if investors are thinking about dot-com era comparisons.

AI is still an accelerating arms race. The four hyperscalers— Amazon.com, Alphabet, Meta Platforms, and Microsoft —are now expected to spend almost $700 billion building out their AI businesses in 2026. At the start of the year, that number was closer to $500 billion. Looking into 2027, Melius analyst Ben Reitzes expects capital expenditures, including those from the likes of Oracle, to top $1 trillion.

The spending spree is on. How tech giants can afford this is a valid question. The answer: easily, by deploying substantial portions of their operating cash flow into data centers, but not at the expense of positive free cash flow this year. The “big four” are expected to generate earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, or Ebitda, of roughly $800 billion. Their balance sheets are also pristine, with essentially no net debt among them.

If they really wanted to get aggressive, they could add $1 trillion to $2 trillion in debt. (To be sure, there has been complex off-balance-sheet financing of some data centers, such as Meta’s in Louisiana, but more can be done.)

As for where Nvidia shares can go, investors can just look at Wall Street’s estimates. The average analyst price target is $270, up 20% from recent levels. That works out to 24 times estimated fiscal-year 2028 earnings, which are expected to expand 35% compared with fiscal-year 2027. (Nvidia’s year ends in January, so fiscal 2028 is essentially calendar year 2027.)

That target is conservative. If Nvidia were just to trade in line with the 26 average multiple of other semiconductor stocks, it would be a $290 stock. Its historic premium to the semiconductor sector justifies a $390 stock price. That target isn’t conservative, but Nvidia shares can easily hit $300 over the coming 12 months, up 33% from recent levels.

To be sure, there are risks. For one, bubble fears persist. Searches for “AI bubble” on Google are up about 400% year over year, having peaked in November. Nvidia’s earnings outlook doesn’t leave much room for error either. It will have to beat analyst sales growth estimates of almost 80% to satisfy investors. A miss isn’t even on the table as Nvidia has beaten sales estimates by an average of about 3% over the last three quarters.

Still, investors’ initial reaction to those earnings reports was to sell the stock (though it eventually recovered). There also remains a persistent fear that Nvidia’s GPUs could lose share to a host of other chips, including application-specific chips from the hyperscalers and CPUs from Intel that are well-suited for agentic computing.

For now, these prospects are distant. Chip demand is only strengthening. AI infrastructure provider Vertiv Holdings reported a 252% increase in fourth-quarter 2025 orders. The company stopped providing detailed order numbers because backlogs were extending further into the future (and perhaps because investors tend to over-focus on one metric). Automation technology provider Zebra Technologies expects memory chips to be in short supply through 2027. And power-generation equipment maker GE Vernova is booking business into the next decade.

What’s more, Arm Holdings and Intel recently said they were unable to meet all demand due to supply-chain constraints. Shortage fears have Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk building a semiconductor fab to ensure enough chips for all the AI applications he is dreaming up.

The total addressable market for AI computing “is bigger than anyone thinks,” says Reitzes. AI agents, which are becoming ubiquitous, will add to demand, for example. These agents, created from Gemini or another AI model, function by constantly inferencing—or accessing—AI computing.

Nvidia chips remain the heart of AI systems. GPUs are particularly well-suited for AI computing because they can handle myriad tasks simultaneously, rather than completing them sequentially like a traditional CPU. The accelerator chips from the likes of SpaceX or Alphabet are designed to perform specific tasks with high efficiency, in addition to the computing that Nvidia chips can handle.

The entire AI computing pyramid will grow, and the base of that pyramid will remain Nvidia.

A grimace is worth a thousand words.

The facial expression in question belongs to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella earlier this week in an Oakland, Calif., courthouse as he took the stand in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI.

Nadella’s discomfort is understandable. Here we have the usually sweater-clad executive in a suit and tie, testifying under oath about his private correspondences, in a multitrillion-dollar trial where he’s locking horns with the richest man in the world.

No doubt Nadella would rather have been at the dentist. And yet, fighting this fight is very much part of his remit, particularly since as of last October, Nadella turned over the keys of the commercial side of Microsoft (which accounts for more than 70% of its revenue) to Judson Althoff, putting him in charge of the most important part of the company.

“I am focused on horizon zero and horizon one,” Althoff tells me in high Microsoft-speak. “Satya tends to focus on horizon two and horizon three.” Translation: Judson’s running the current business. Satya’s going to figure this artificial-intelligence thing out.

The two endeavors are inextricably linked, as Microsoft hopes that business customers increasingly will adopt its Microsoft 365 Copilot AI product and other AI offerings. In other words, selling AI is very much a here-and-now matter for Microsoft.

Even though Microsoft says that Nadella will “be laser-focused on our highest-ambition technical work,” the CEO must also wrestle with massive strategic issues, like Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI and its ChatGPT large-language model, the “brains” of its AI endeavors. Microsoft has invested nearly $12 billion in OpenAI over the past seven years, and now has a 27% stake in that company worth a staggering $230 billion.

Musk’s lawsuit is an existential threat to that relationship as he seeks to wind OpenAI back to its 2015 nonprofit roots—as well as undo its special relationship with Microsoft. (Microsoft also has a partnership with OpenAI rival Anthropic.)

And yet there may be even more to Nadella’s pained look than just battling Musk—that being Microsoft’s stock performance, which over the past year has declined by 9.6% versus gains of 138.1% for Alphabet and 27.3% for the S&P 500 index.

Of course, Microsoft shares over Nadella’s tenure, which began on Feb. 4, 2014, have been like a SpaceX rocket, up 1,025% versus 322% for the market. Nadella’s predecessor as CEO, Steve Ballmer, once told me, “I love Satya. I haven’t sold my stock.” (Ballmer reportedly owns some 300 million shares, now worth $130 billion. They were valued at just under $12 billion when Nadella took over as CEO.)

Microsoft’s recent quarterly numbers were up briskly almost across the board. The company reported adjusted earnings of $4.27 a share on revenue of $82.9 billion for its fiscal third quarter, while analysts expected $4.05 a share on revenue of $81.4 billion. Its Azure cloud business grew a stellar 40%.

On Friday, the ever-voluble hedge fund manager Bill Ackman disclosed in an 887-word tweet that he had recently acquired a position in Microsoft as “a core holding.”

Still, AI fears are making the Beast of Redmond, as Microsoft is sometimes called, look a little less fearsome. The Financial Times reported that Chris Hohn, the highly regarded manager of TCI Fund Management, sold most of its $8 billion stake in Microsoft, which it had held for the past 10 years. TCI, the most profitable hedge fund in the world last year with a sterling long-term record, noted in its letter to shareholders: “We reduced our investment in Microsoft because the rapid progress in AI introduces uncertainty over Microsoft’s competitive position in the future.” (It will be great fun to see who’s right here, Hohn or Ackman.)

Another risk to Microsoft posed by AI is prodigious capital spending on chips to run AI, data centers, and electric power generation. Capex has climbed from $24 billion in fiscal year 2021 to $88 billion in fiscal year 2025. The $190 billion projected this year is based on MSFT’s 2026 calendar year.

That multi-hundred-billion-dollar spend, plus Hohn’s concerns about AI making Microsoft’s legacy business obsolete and questions about AI adoption by Microsoft’s customers, are making Wall Street nervous and raising questions that Althoff, in his increasingly public-facing role, wants to address. (Note that Althoff, 53, may one day be in line to become CEO of Microsoft, though that would be years off, as Nadella, 58, isn’t likely to be going anywhere anytime soon.)

So, what does Althoff think about those AI worries?

“They don’t concern me, because I think the market is still trying to figure out AI,” he says. “When customers or analysts start thinking, ‘Gosh, AI is gonna eat software or SaaS,’ it comes from the place of seeing parlor tricks. It’s very easy to ask a model to create a document or spreadsheet. It is materially more difficult to say, ‘Take this presentation for a meeting with my board, update this data on our financial performance, and give me the six-trailing quarter view of a certain business and have it be in context, accurate, and pulling from secure sources.’ ”

As for the capital being spent, Althoff is equally sanguine. “Yes, it’s expensive,” he says. “I don’t get concerned. We’re building for our first-party AI solutions and infrastructure for Anthropic. We’re building for a future where the combination of human ambition and AI will come together to run the world’s business processes.”

Microsoft says it has 20 million paying seats for its premium AI Copilot product out of a total of some 450 million business seats. Tigress Financial Partners, which has a Buy rating on the stock and a price target of $680 (the stock currently trades at $407) notes that “adoption is scaling rapidly, with paid Copilot seats growing triple digits year over year to tens of millions of users.”

But what are customers actually doing with Microsoft’s AI products? Raj Sharma, global managing partner for Growth & Innovation at EY, has rolled out an agentic AI platform, called EY Canvas, to facilitate the company’s core global audit business, based on Microsoft AI products.

“If I looked at all the [technology] stack and the capital spend that is required, only three companies stood out to me for an enterprise of our size: Microsoft, Google, and AWS,” says Sharma.

“We picked Microsoft because of our longstanding relationship, and they will give us access to any models, whether it is OpenAI or Anthropic. Also, there was a level of trust with them that they will co-innovate with us.”

Rob Goldstein, COO of BlackRock, says his company worked with Microsoft and its AI tools to translate BlackRock’s websites into local languages around the world. “These are highly regulated websites that need to have all sorts of information about the company and the products we provide,” he says. “We feel very good about our relationship with [Microsoft],” but he adds, “this will not be a one-vendor game.”

All hasn’t been smooth sailing in Microsoft’s AI efforts. The Wall Street Journal reported that customers have been confused by various Microsoft AI brands and products, and that some have preferred using Google’s Gemini and other options. The company recently changed up leadership in its AI teams, presumably to address these issues.

To longstanding Microsoft watchers, as my colleague Adam Levine noted in a recent Barron’s cover story, the choppy start may be chapter one of a familiar narrative: Microsoft typically isn’t first, but the company’s vast installed base means it can switch into Beast Mode and win in the end.

That last point almost makes Althoff cringe. “We take nothing for granted,” he says. “While I am proud of our base and grateful to our customers for trusting Microsoft, I want to make sure that we continue to build the best AI capability. I always say to my folks, ‘Neither winning or losing are statements of perpetuity.’ ”

The bottom line is that companies want to know if shelling out big bucks today for AI tools, from Microsoft or its competitors, is truly worth it. Right now, the jury may still be out. In a new white paper, “LLMs Corrupt Your Documents When You Delegate,” researchers concluded that for longer tasks, “current LLMs are unreliable delegates: They introduce sparse but severe errors that silently corrupt documents, compounding over long interaction.”

The three authors of the paper are from Microsoft Research.

For investors with insomnia, Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman has just the tonic, and it’s right around the corner: 23-hour-a-day trading. (Still only five days a week, though.)

I asked Friedman why this was necessary.

“Technology has really continued to advance to allow for investors from all over the world to be able to trade in U.S. equities anytime during the day,” she says. “Trading 23-5 is already happening. It’s just happening in the dark. Our systems today open at 4 a.m., and we allow trading to start then, and they close at 8 p.m. So, we are already trading outside of U.S. market hours. What we’re doing is basically expanding that.”

Traditional U.S. stock exchanges are open only from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern Time, but extended trading has been growing through various means. Some institutions and individuals trade in lower-liquidity after-hour sessions. Some broker-dealers offer extended trading for certain stocks, and there are also derivatives that can mimic after-hours trading. Crypto and currencies trade 24-7.

Friedman notes that Nasdaq is partnering to facilitate longer hours. “We’ve worked with the industry to bring the consolidated tape and have that launch at the same time, which is Dec. 6,” she says. “You will have central transparency of all of the trading and quoting activity that’s occurring in the lit venues and dark pools around the world.” The exchange plans to add circuit breakers to halt trading if prices go up or down too much, “so we have more trading guardrails,” she adds.

Friedman notes that the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. is extending its hours so there will be real-time clearing.

“There are millions of investors who want to access the U.S. economy and trade amazing companies, and this will give them a good infrastructure to be able to do that,” Friedman says. “We feel that it will increase overall demand and increase the pie. We’re working with a lot of clients who are looking at how to expand their infrastructure to support 23-5 trading, and we can provide technology to support them.”

AI boom could end the de-equitisation ‘put’

This US bull market has not been accompanied by the usual deluge of equity issuance. Until now

Shrinking equity supply has helped this bull market defy the bears. Fewer new shares have been listed. More old shares have been delisted. This may be changing.

Back in 2003, public equities were looking very cheap compared with bonds. The S&P 500 index had dropped 50 per cent from post-dotcom-bubble-crash peaks and 10-year US Treasury yields, which move inversely to prices, had fallen to 3 per cent. However, institutional investors, and their regulators, had been so scarred by the bear market that they could not, or would not, close this valuation gap. 

This offered an opportunity to less traditional buyers. Listed companies bought their own shares via buybacks, or their competitors’ shares via debt-financed takeovers. Private equity investors joined in by borrowing cheap debt to delist public companies. Issuance via IPOs, secondaries and equity-financed mergers and acquisitions slowed to a trickle.

Equitisation was over, de-equitisation had begun. Public markets started to shrink. Predicting this trend helped make my career as an equity strategist. And it just won’t go away. Both the US and UK public equity markets have “de-equitised” to some extent in each of the past four years, according to Datastream.

It looks very different to the acceleration of equity issuance associated with the last major tech-driven bull market. In 1998-2000, the US IT sector increased its equity base by 40 per cent. In the past four years, it has shrunk it by 4 per cent.

This is because large-cap US IT companies haven’t needed new funding. In fact, their capex-lite business models have allowed them to return cash to investors. The Magnificent 7 Big Tech stocks bought back $230bn of shares in 2025. Some of that was used to finance employee share plans, but it also provided the funding for IPOs elsewhere in the sector. This tech bull run has been self-financed. 

It all seems very different to previous bubbles. Canals in the 1800s, railways in the 1840s, radio stocks in the 1920s and telecoms, media and technology shares in the 1990s were all notoriously capital-intensive booms.

But Big Tech’s capex-lite model seems to be changing. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are expected to collectively invest $725bn this year as they go all-in on the AI boom. Consequently, Meta and Alphabet have paused their buybacks. That’s a big change from the combined $92bn they recycled back to the market in 2024.

Apple has chosen to sit out this capex boom and has announced another $100bn of share buybacks in 2026. But even here the positive impact will be reduced. At a $4.3tn total market cap, $100bn buys a lot less Apple stock than it used to.

Of course, there have been large amounts of new tech shares issued and capital raised, but this has not been via the public markets. Instead, OpenAI and Anthropic have been able to privately raise a combined $152bn in 2026.

This private market equitisation now looks set to spill over into the public market. SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are exploring IPOs, seeking collective valuation of up to $4tn. The public equity market will not need to soak up all these shares immediately, but earlier-stage private investors (and employees) will surely want to cash out, at least partially. Their unsold stock may overhang the public markets for years. A $4tn collective valuation would amount to a substantial 6 per cent equity expansion of the US public equity market, a figure last seen in the late 1990s bubble.

De-equitisation is a key reason why the current bull market has been able to defy high valuations, rising interest rates, trade wars and geopolitical tensions. There have been periodic market wobbles, but these have not been preceded by the equity oversupply associated with the bursting of previous bubbles. Instead, listed companies have kept buying back their shares. Private equity has kept taking companies private. The de-equitisation put remained in place. 

And, as any undergraduate economist knows, shrinking supply and rising demand should lead to higher prices. The bears have missed this point.

However, we can finally see a meaningful amount of public equity supply coming down the track. The de-equitisation “put” — where shares are supported by buybacks or deals to take companies private if they fall too far — may start to fade, at least in the US.

Back in the late 1990s bull market, a senior equity capital markets banker said to me: “If the ducks are quacking, feed them.” In US big-cap tech, they have been quacking for some time. It finally looks like they are about to be fed.