Ok, back to financials…. I’ve been thinking about this for some time and I can’t say I disagree that we are due for some correction some time in some sectors. But in every disaster, there’s bound to be some winners as well.
Regarding the riot: it’s my opinion that this is a short term thing that won’t have a huge long term impact, except maybe in the areas were the riots are taking place. But I don’t think these social unrest will continue indefinitely.
Covid: it appears there are large swarms of businesses that will be permanently affected, particularly businesses that require close contact with people. However, there’s got to be some evolution to some other form. Just some examples.
Movie theaters: these were already in a death spiral even before pre-covid. However, covid accelerated the push to online content and stream services. Disney’s push to monetizing their own streaming service outside of netflix or anyone else seems to suggest there’s a huge money opportunity for streaming services, and we are only getting started. So while companies like AMC theaters probably will do horrible moving forward, I’m not convinced the movie industry will contract.
Work from home: there’s a very large population that has been working remotely. And this probably has change the landscape of the work environment. People don’t need to go into an office anymore, it’s more acceptable to have remote employees. This seems to have very large implications. As my own company is experiencing this, I think this is going to seriously make some companies reconsider a need for leasing office space. If most everyone is working remotely or from home, why bother leasing a big office? Maybe moving forward, the WeWork shared office space makes more sense. Meanwhile, people who are working at home…now need a home office. I think this might make people considering upgrading their home. Working from home also opens the door to a lot of new technology that needs to be done. For example, better streaming tech, better security, more tools app for facilitating collaboration, better hardware and software. A lot of work needs to be done here. And look at how this is driving some of the things in the tech sector. Computer hardware spending is going up. Companies like Xoom and Slack are killing it. SnapChat, once thought was going to die, is not suddenly looking not so bad as a communication media. Microsoft is now pushing for their collaborative work environment. We now need higher bandwidth, and this could accelerate adoption of 5G.
My company is in the middle of trying to figure out how to allow some customers open early, and how to implement effective contact tracing without stepping over people’s privacy and violating Hippa. This shit is hard. And there’s no way we are going to be able to solve these problems to allow people to open safely overnight. It’s going to take months/years, and it will continue to evolve.
People think Covid is going to accelerate a recession. I’m not so sure. Maybe manual skill labor job people will be highly affected. But I’m thinking covid is going to force people to spend money to rethink reinvent a lot of way we do business and enjoy our leisure activities in order to survive. Covid was such a sudden and unexpected jolt, no one was really prepared to handle it correctly. So that no money or resources were spent to prepare for it. That money is now being spent, and it’s partly being subsidized by governments because the hit was so large, government intervention was needed. Now, there’s a lot of flurry of activity to see how we can adapt to covid. Some of this will be successful, some wont be. And some new things will come out of this
On the other hand, if covid did not happen, perhaps a natural recession might have taken place, because the economy would have grown stale from lack of growth and lack of new opportunities that covid that has now opened the doors to.
Take biotech/pharma for instance. Covid is driving more research for a vaccine and for early detection. This is a lot of jobs and a lot of money exchanging hands that wasn’t happening pre-covid.
Also, if we continue along with a economic cold war with china, which at this point is probably very likely, we will be preoccupied “arming” this country. We’re already seeing this, by bringing a lot of the work here.
