Lower-earning Americans are increasingly strapped for cash: On recent corporate earnings calls, some CEOs warned that their customers are struggling to deal with rising gas prices and higher inflation.

Why it matters: That's painful on an individual level, and more broadly it could be a sign of a slowing economy — a warning to investors and a hit to the various companies that sell stuff to people.

Where it stands: "They're literally running out of money at the end of the month," Kraft Heinz CEO Steve Cahillane said in an interview with Bloomberg last week.

• "We're seeing negative cash flows in the lower-income brackets where they're dipping into savings."
• His comments echoed remarks from McDonald's CEO Christopher Kempczinski, who talked about rising gas prices disproportionately hitting low-income consumers. "The pressures there are going to continue," he said.
• Last week, Whirlpool CEO Marc Bitzer said the appliance industry is seeing an industry decline on par with the financial crisis.

By the numbers: Americans are spending down their savings. The personal savings rate was at 3.6% in March — the lowest since the "revenge spending" days of 2022.

• They also feel worse than ever. The University of Michigan's preliminary consumer sentiment reading, out Friday, hit its lowest reading dating back to 1952 — the previous low was in April.

Yes, but: A low savings rate could also be a sign that Americans feel comfortable spending.

• And there are at least some low earners trying to hold on to what they've got in the bank.
• People who spend less than $1,000 a month are now holding more savings in their checking accounts, "as they seem to be bracing for higher prices to remain in place for a while," Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, said in a note Friday.

State of play: For lower-income households, high gas prices are eating into other spending categories.

• Households earning less than $40,000 cut back on gas buying by 7% in March as prices soared, per research out this month from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. They likely took public transit a bit more and tried to carpool.
• Still, most people do need to drive to work and school. The New York Fed found that lower earners still spent 12% more money on gas.
• Higher-income households, meanwhile, reduced gas buying only "modestly."

Flashback: The same split happened back in 2022, when prices spiked after Russia invaded Ukraine — but the gap between high and low earners is now wider, the New York Fed notes.

What to watch: Walmart's next earnings report later this month will be a bellwether.

• In its investor call in February, the company signaled that lower-earning households were hurting. "Wallets are stretched" for those households making less than $50,000, CEO John Furner said.
• Most of the company's sales gains were coming from higher-income families, he said.
• This was before the Iran war sent gas prices up.

Reality check: These economic woes may be confined to just the lowest earners. Higher-income shoppers are still driving growth at both McDonald's and Walmart, the companies said.

• The latest jobs numbers showed a resilient labor market. GDP growth was solid, and consumer spending is holding up.

The bottom line: This is the K-shaped economy in action: The rich keep the overall picture looking good, while underneath the headline numbers, it looks bleak.

Sports is no longer a diversion for billionaires and private equity. It's a defensive strategy.

The big picture: Investors have come to view sports as the last bulwark against AI disruption.

• AI certainly will change pro and college team operations — including more dynamic pricing — but the core product will continue to be athletic competition.

Behind the scenes: Most conversations Axios had last week at the Milken conference eventually became talks about AI and its eventual potential to upend even blue-collar industries, like plumbing and hair-cutting.

• "Sports" was always cited as the exception to the rule, suggesting that rising team prices won't plateau any time soon.

Yes but: Not all sports investments will succeed.

• A lot of new leagues have launched in recent years. They're startups with the commensurate risk of failure, particularly if the audience fragments so much that profit becomes impossible.
• Second, the NFL is about to renegotiate its media rights deal, which could pull revenue from other leagues.
• That's one reason that some PE investors are favoring youth sports — where the consumer is the athlete (or their parents), rather than a spectator.

Driving the news: The next big landmark sports deal may be for the NFL's Seattle Seahawks, who are on the block despite having just won the Super Bowl.

The bottom line: Sports doesn't scale like other industries, but it also doesn't risk obsolescence.

Investors appear to have rediscovered semiconductor stocks in a big way.

The big picture: Long the backbone of the digital economy, semiconductors have attained even greater importance in the AI spending boom.

• Because it's not just the graphics processing units, or GPUs, like those made by Nvidia, that are needed for generative AI models. Memory chips and more conventional central processing unit chips, or CPUs, are also required for the AI rollout.

By the numbers: As a result, semiconductor stocks have soared so far this year. Take two examples:

• Intel, a maker of CPUs long seen as a laggard in need of help from both the Biden and Trump administrations, has had a comeback under CEO Lip-Bu Tan, and its shares are up 239% this year.
• "For the last few years, the story around high-performance computing was almost exclusively about GPU and other accelerators," Tan said on Intel's earnings call last month, per an AlphaSense transcript. "In recent months, we have seen clear signs that the CPU is reasserting itself as the indispensable foundation of the AI era."
• Memory chipmaker Sandisk, meanwhile, is up an astounding 558% so far this year.

The PHLX semiconductor index, which tracks 30 of the largest companies in the industry that are traded in the U.S., has gained nearly 67% in 2026.

• Its recent trading performance has been its best since March 2000 — the peak of the dot-com market.

What to watch for: As with anything AI, the thing to watch for is any sign of a significant pullback or slowdown in spending by the Big Tech companies furiously building data centers.