Stock Market & Economic Commentary – June 2026

“The more you want something to be true, the more likely you are to believe a story that overestimates the odds of it being true.” – Morgan Housel, 41, prominent financial writer, behavioural economics expert, and bestselling author. Author of The Psychology of Money.

SpaceX and the romance of the spreadsheet

“If I Can Dream” – Song by Elvis Presley, 1966.

“There must be lights burning brighter somewhere
Got to be birds flying higher in a sky more blue
If I can dream of a better land
Where all my brothers walk hand in hand
Tell me why, oh why, oh why can’t my dream come true”

When valuing a listed company, it is difficult enough to estimate how many aeroplanes, sports cars, or pairs of jeans the world will want years from now — and what share of that demand any one business can realistically capture. But how do you value the future cash flows of placing humans in space, on the moon, and ultimately on Mars, when the addressable “market” is as much an engineering frontier as it is an economic one?

That is the puzzle investors were invited to solve with this month’s public offering of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which hit a valuation target stretching towards $2 trillion.

According to the 200,000-word public offering document, the mercurial Musk, the man who bought Twitter pretty much by accident and changed its name to X, confidently predicts that SpaceX will “extend the light of consciousness to the stars”.

Its total addressable market, he says, is $28.5 trillion – an amount equivalent to around one fifth of global GDP. Or put another way, that is $3,500 worth of goods and/or services for every man, woman and child on planet Earth.

Elvis Presley’s song, “If I Can Dream”, endures because it holds two thoughts in one: the world is imperfect and the future can be better. It is hope with substance— the refusal to accept that tomorrow must be a smaller version of today.

That tension feels oddly relevant to stock markets right now. The SpaceX public offering documents, peppered with pictures of rockets and artist visualisations of human life on the moon, correctly explain that humans have been overly reliant on planet Earth. We must look beyond this “single celestial body”, as “we do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs”.

With a stock market valuation in the trillions of dollars and an historic capital raise of $75 billion, the numbers are not just large; they are a statement about how much future investors think can be squeezed into one share price. Ranked by valuation, SpaceX is now the sixth-largest company in the US. But ranked by its current revenue, it is only on a par with Lucky Charms cereal maker General Mills.

But the more interesting question is not the headline numbers. It is what the numbers assume. Valuing most businesses is hard enough, but at least the anchors are familiar: units, pricing, market share, repeat demand, and future earnings. SpaceX is a different creature. Is it a launch business? A satellite broadband utility? A defence and government contractor? Or an infrastructure platform whose most valuable economics lie further out in the future than investors are comfortable admitting?

Much of the investment case appears to circle Starlink, a division of SpaceX. The company is already an advanced builder and operator of reusable rockets, spacecraft, and satellites. It operates a successful revenue-generating high-speed global broadband data and communications network powered by approximately 9,600 satellites.

The IPO filing claims $18.7 billion of consolidated revenue in 2025, with $11.4 billion attributed to Starlink, alongside a reported $4.9 billion loss. That combination is not unusual in frontier industries: meaningful revenue now, heavy spending to build what comes next.

And this is where the romance of the dream collides with the discipline of the spreadsheet. At these valuation levels, investors are not simply buying what the business is today; they are underwriting a chain of assumptions about technology, execution, regulation, geopolitics, and competition. A long chain of assumptions about what must go right, and for how long, for distant, capital-intensive ambitions to translate into durable, investable cash flows. The dream is not free. The dream is priced. The dream is expensive.

This sort of moment can go either way. Sometimes the future arrives, but later than hoped. Sometimes it arrives in a different form. Sometimes it fails to arrive at all. But occasionally the world really does change, and the companies building the enabling infrastructure end up sitting on economic prime real estate. That is what the markets are trying to decide here: not just whether SpaceX can grow, but whether it can become a lasting piece of tomorrow.

AI and Jobs — anxiety, aspiration, and the messy reality of work

“We are being afflicted with a new disease… namely, technological unemployment.” – John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), English economist whose writings became known as ‘Keynesian economics’.

Space is the spectacular version of “betting on the future”. AI is the everyday version — already turning up in the office, the call centre, and the back office. One points to distant horizons. The other could reshape work and productivity much sooner, which is why it provokes both excitement and unease.

We are warned that an unstoppable “tsunami” of job losses is coming towards us. Beyond Silicon Valley, people are asking how AI ought, or ought not, to shape the future of work.

Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, offered one of the more arresting forecasts of the AI age in a January essay. If recent improvements continue, he wrote, “it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything.” It is the kind of sentence that makes you stop and think.

It also revives John Maynard Keynes 1930 thought experiment: technology solves the “economic problem”, and his descendants work a 15‑hour week. The dream is seductive. The history is awkward.

If the past is any guide, the answer is probably no. Not because AI will be a damp squib, but because societies have a deep habit of absorbing new technologies without abolishing work. We do not slide neatly into leisure. We churn jobs. We redesign them. We argue about them.

One reason is simple: human desires are not fixed. A static view imagines a finite list of tasks that machines conquer until nothing remains. That is not how life works. Mechanisation reduced the labour needed to produce essentials, but rising incomes created demand for new things, including healthcare, education, leisure, and personal services, and that demand created jobs. The “economic problem” in rich societies is often not scarcity; it is the open-ended nature of human aspiration.

A second reason: people value people. Even if AI becomes technically better at many tasks, it does not follow that we will always prefer a machine-only provision. Many roles rely on judgment, reassurance, and responsibility in a human context. In medicine, for example, even where AI becomes highly capable, humans remain central because the job includes explanation, trust, and decision-making under uncertainty.

Third, technology often raises demand by cutting costs. When services become cheaper, we usually consume more of them. Cheaper computing did not eliminate work in technology; it created whole new sectors. If AI lowers the cost of producing documents, designs, analysis and customer support, demand will expand. New complementary roles will appear, including ones we cannot yet name.

Fourth, technology is slowed by friction. The QR‑code menu was cheap and labour-saving, yet the human waiter has returned in many restaurants because eating out is also social. Coffee machines make excellent coffee, yet people still pay for staffed cafés because they like the human contact and the atmosphere. Businesses do not optimise solely for labour reduction; they optimise for trust, reliability, brand and customer experience. AI will face the same frictions, especially where errors are costly and reputations fragile.

None of this is complacency. Disruption is already happening, particularly in more structured entry-level work. Tasks will be automated, jobs will be lost, and many more will change. The adjustment could be quick in routine cognitive roles. But “better machines, therefore humans become useless” is still a leap. AI will change work profoundly; it is less clear whether it will end the desire to work for and with other people.

Technology is rarely the only force shaping employment. Globalisation, demographics, competition, regulation, and politics all matter. The story of work is not a clean narrative of “machines take jobs”. It is messier, a continuous churn, with a long-running decline in routine work and a rise in roles involving complexity, judgement, and human contact.

This is where the data is sobering in a good way. Deloitte analysed the UK labour market between 2004 and 2024 across 400+ job types. They estimate 3.5 million jobs disappeared and 8.5 million were created — a net gain of roughly 5 million, about 35% growth. They also noted that the losses were real (including around 700,000 manufacturing jobs and 600,000 secretarial roles), but that the jobs created were, on average, more skilled than those lost.

Many experts think AI will be different, that it reaches far up the cognitive ladder and threatens even the “human” work that has grown most this century. Only time will tell. It is highly likely we will see both: meaningful displacement in some areas, and powerful augmentation in others. The key question is not whether work changes, it will, but how quickly organisations adapt, and who captures the productivity gains along the way.

Predictions are easy, implementation is hard — and that is why the future usually arrives later, messier, and more interesting than the experts predicted.

As always, we thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to updating you regularly throughout 2026.

Please click here to access The Clarion Investment Diary for June with full details of the Clarion Portfolio Funds, including performance statistics.

Keith W Thompson

Clarion Group Chairman

June 2026

Risk Warnings

Any investment performance figures referred to relate to past performance which is not a reliable indicator of future results and should not be the sole factor of consideration when selecting a product or strategy. The value of investments, and the income arising from them, can go down as well as up and is not guaranteed, which means that you may not get back what you invested. Unless indicated otherwise, performance figures are stated in British Pounds. Where performance figures are stated in other currencies, changes in exchange rates may also cause an investment to fluctuate in value.

The content of this article does not constitute financial advice and you may wish to seek professional advice based on your individual circumstances before making any financial decisions.