The top of the investment-grade issuer list has always been banks — balance sheets are their product. The 08/2026 table: JPMorgan $176B, BofA $171B, Morgan Stanley $167B, Goldman $131B… then Amazon at #5 ($121B) and Oracle at #6 ($117B), ahead of Wells Fargo and Citi; the top 10 are 13% of the index. Tech companies borrowing like banks is new — the AI capex wave is restructuring the bond market’s composition, not just the stock market’s.
The driver is the The Mag-7 free-cash-flow bet: capex ate the cash machines, so the difference is borrowed — ~$200B of Big Tech bonds YTD, nearly double all of 2025 (Kobeissi, https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2086123017428512828). Credit is repricing the privilege accordingly: Oracle’s 5y CDS at a record ~215bp (+70bp YTD, the worst of the cohort), Broadcom +48, Meta at 95, Nvidia at 82 — each a record or near-record for paper that traded like quasi-sovereigns a year ago.
The consequence for IG investors: “the index” increasingly is AI-capex risk. Spread analyses calibrated on a bank-dominated index quietly changed underlying; a credit allocation bought for diversification away from equities now holds the same names as the equity book.
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