His key take was that the pandemic had brought a long standing trend to a head – traditional hard asset firms are being eclipsed in terms of market capitalisation and strategic flexibility by younger, fast-moving tech firms.

He thinks many traditional firms will seek to use the crisis to greatly trim their workforce, which is holding these companies back from pivoting quickly in response to trends.

He thinks this could be accelerated by deepening Government money-printing, which could de-value currencies. He then thinks a flight to safety will benefit the cash-rich tech firms.

It is an interesting thesis but in my view, it could just as easily fall the other way. If we see greater inflation and that hits the economy hard, safety may be in hard assets not ultimately frivolous tech firms with inflated values.

Facebook might have an enormous market cap, but if it disappeared tomorrow, the world would not fall apart. Facebook isn’t real life, it’s an abstraction and the connections it makes can be quite easily achieved a thousand other ways. Arguably, its real value is limited.

A large transport company on the other hand may have very modest profits and market cap, but if it disappeared tomorrow it would have very tangible and damaging impacts on the real world. What it does cannot be easily achieved via other means. It has enduring value.

So what counts?

It depends who decides. If the financial world decides, they’ll back where the bulk of their money is, i.e. the tech firms. But if Governments are ultimately making his decision, they are more likely to place value on the human and material assets out in the world.

So, the real question is then, who is the ultimate authority that gets to make that decision, the ‘markets’ or Governments? I don’t think it’s clear who ultimately would hold sway.

Note – for the sake of this editorial, we’ve made some assumptions that we hope will not come to pass. That is, we hope increased QE does not lead to inflation, we hope the economic paralysis caused by the COVDI19 crisis does not last too long, and that neither Governments, nor markets are forced to make stark decisions on the economy.