On Where the US Economy is Right Now with COVID-19

Currently, in the US it’s basically a question of how long the Federal Reserve can hold the sky up on its back while fighting heavy gravity.   The way I see things right now:  

1) In 2 months we hit the 2nd highest unemployment levels in modern US history, at the fastest rate in US history.  

2) There is no real end in sight to the shutdowns or the virus.

3) There is no plan from the Federal US government.

4) Unemployment is and will continue to get worse on a daily basis for the foreseeable future.

5) The US government will be printing TRILLIONS of dollars over the next several years.  The US (and rest of the world’s too!) debt levels and deficits will go higher then WW2 likely by end of 2020.

6) Every day this continues consumer confidence continues to slowly drop, meaning even if we partially re-open, people aren’t going to be buying stuff.  It will take years, even once a vaccine is invented, for people to go back to the levels of spending/confidence as at the end of 2019.       

My buddy who is a life long hedge fund guy sent me the following this morning: "I have no clue how the market works anymore.  Maybe I never did.  I checked the S&P500 this morning and I could barely believe it”  

For those who know what the relatively new theory of Modern Monetary Theory consists of, well we are about to find out in a global real world experiment if it is right or wrong.  Buckle up.

Tech in 2020 and the coming Decade

One of my favorite thought leaders, Benedict Evans, recently published a large through piece on where tech is going over the next decade, especially with mobile becoming a mature market. As always, his presentations are great. Take a look here.

Big Trends for 2019

For the last 2 years ARK Invest has put out an interesting look ahead for the year focused on what they see as the big technology trends. You can find the latest for 2019 here. Some points I found particularly interesting this year are:

• This has been apparent for several years but barely talked about in the media, but the cost of lithium ion batteries is dropping rapidly, allowing a transformation in how we consume energy and our electrical grid systems. Due to this they forecast electric vehicles will be cheaper by early 2020s than any comparable internal combustion engine vehicle.

• They might be cherry picking their data but they do make the case that bitcoin and crypto demand is accelerating in emerging markets with unstable currencies.

• The rise of digital wallet apps in the US grabbing market share, just like they’ve long been dominant in China with WeChat. They specifically call out Venmo and Square as evolving into the center of a consumers financial life.

Interesting Markets in 2019

Serial entrepreneur and investor Elad Gil put out an interesting post a few weeks ago with sectors he thought would see noticeable growth in 2019. I like that it is not the standard list oft repeated by technology journals and is based off a bottoms up view of deals he is seeing. You can see the original post here.

Of the 7 markets he lays out the Devsumer (where consumers start doing developer lite tasks on their own) is the one that jumped out at me as extremely unique and interesting thesis. I’m not so sure that we will see the majority of the population doing basic coding tasks and automation to help them in their day to day job/lives but its certainly a cool thought.

AI and Cybersecurity

The AI Now Institute recently released their annual review looking at AI and security. Their annual report for 2018 can be seen here. The main theme this year is that governments need to start regulating AI yesterday, especially the use of facial recognition technologies. The institute believes that the biggest near term risk is the use of AI in surveillance technologies and automated decision making, especially by the state on their people.

The report is a fascinating read on an area of AI most people haven’t thought about so take a look.