Global Head of Macro Strategy
Summary: Next year’s most anticipated wedding inspires Gen Z to drop the doomscrolling and dial up the real world, marriages - babies and all.
2026 becomes the year of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. The already insanely popular music-and-sports power couple follows through on their engagement with a majestic January destination wedding, far from prying eyes, on a private island in Turks and Caicos. The wedding is an intimate affair on short notice after Kelce’s Kansas City Chiefs fail to make the NFL playoffs (to the great joy of NFL fans on the Saxo Strategy Team).
Like a perfect fairy tale, Swift later announces she became pregnant on her wedding night and that the newlyweds are expecting an autumn baby. As Kelce hangs up his cleats and retires from the NFL, the couple moves close to family in the Midwest to build a private, safe environment for their child—well away from the LA or NYC limelight. They vow that their child will not be allowed access to online entertainment or phones and tablets until at least age 12. They also announce a pullback from social media, posting only occasionally to a new website.
Hundreds of millions of Swifties, the devoted fan base of Taylor Swift around the world, are inspired by the couple’s lifestyle and decisions. Swift and Kelce’s focus on stepping away from constant online time and building a family triggers a global boom in young people choosing to follow suit. Marriage rates and births among young millennials and older Gen Z rise sharply as more of life goes offline.
As screen time slips, online giants from Meta to Google face slower growth, while a family-formation boom jolts economic activity into overdrive—especially in housing and DIY. With leading indicators bolting higher, the IMF and World Bank revise global GDP forecasts up by more than one percentage point per year for the next five years, and demographers scramble to reassess the pace of population decline across the OECD and advanced EMs. Wall Street quickly dubs the whole remarkable episode the “Swiftie put.”
Market impact: negative for social media stocks, positive for everything homebuilding/DIY/décor, luxury, wedding venues, destination/travel
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