ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood downplays Fed rate-hike fears, says tech boom will crush inflation

The Federal Reserve just hiked rates again. Cathie Wood’s response? Essentially a shrug. The ARK Invest CEO, whose firm manages roughly $42 billion in assets, used her latest newsletter to argue that the Fed’s September 21 rate increase, a 25 basis point bump pushing the target range to 3.75-4%, is a sideshow compared to the deflationary force of technological innovation. In her view, the productivity gains pouring out of artificial intelligence and adjacent sectors will not just survive higher rates. They’ll thrive despite them. The case against panic Wood’s argument rests on a historical parallel that’s hard to ignore. She compared the current economic moment to the Industrial Revolution, a period when short-term interest rates and equity markets rose simultaneously without triggering the kind of catastrophic downturn that rate hawks love to predict. US equities pushed toward all-time highs even after the Fed’s latest hike. That disconnect between rising rates and rising stocks is exactly the dynamic Wood has been flagging since mid-2026. Her inflation read is even more provocative. While headline Consumer Price Index figures tend to dominate financial cable news, Wood points to ...