Ready for roaring Twenties
Pressing the rewind button on the past decade is a useful reminder of how quickly things change and how unpredictable the economy – and life – can be.
This time ten years ago, there were no iPads, no selfie sticks, no greggs’ vegan sausage rolls and no Ubers.
Climate change was still a fringe interest and no-one had heard of a little girl named greta Thunberg, who was about to celebrate her seventh birthday. ‘Woke’ was still the past tense of a verb, not an adjective for a person on hyper- alert for political incorrect-ness.
gordon Brown was in number 10, few gave much thought to Brexit, and no-one expected Donald Trump to follow Barack Obama into the White House.
All of this goes to prove it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future – a saying variously attributed to baseball player Yogi Berra, Hollywood mogul sam goldwyn, and physicist niels Bohr.
Having said that, there are some trends likely to have repercussions for us all as investors, in our lives at work and at home.
Artificial intelligence and robotics is a big one. robots are already taking on tasks that used to be done by humans, which has led to fears over jobs.
in a benign scenario, however, this will increase productivity because robots don’t go off sick, take parental leave or go on holiday and it could free up humans to engage in more creative and lucrative activities.
Ageing populations is another established trend that will create big opportunities in ‘silver tech,’ or innovations to help elderly people and their carers. innovation is likely to include new medicines, vaccines and 3D printing of replacement organs.
Banking is changing at breakneck speed as more of us do our transactions online or on a smartphone, with the danger of millions of traditionally-minded customers being left behind.
Andrew Bailey, the new governor of the Bank of england, is likely to see huge changes to central banking. The furore over bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies may have died down. But in an age where any clever techie can create a currency, there are questions over whether central bankers can continue to call the shots.
COMPANIES will be under pressure from shareholders and governments to behave in an environmentally responsible way, and practising moral capitalism.
Women will reshape businesses and economies, not just in the West but in the developing world. As visionary capitalists such as Bill gates can see, investing in education for girls will pay dividends, as will the supply of water, sanitation, electricity, and internet access to free women from backbreaking unpaid work.
it would certainly be a far more useful direction for foreign aid than some of the strange projects recently revealed, such as ridding uninhabited islands of mice.
The recent UK election was a battleground over capitalism itself, which has come under question as never before in living memory.
it’s certainly possible to paint a dark picture of the past ten years and to extrapolate that the next decade will be bleak.
But if we look beyond our own immediate reality, a different narrative emerges. Yes, recent years have been marked by debt and financial crises, but millions of people have been lifted out of poverty.
Thirty years ago, the World Bank found more than a third lived in extreme poverty. Today, it is less than 10pc and infant mortality has more than halved in the last 20 years, says the World Health Organisation.
Capitalism has many obvious faults, but it is still our best hope for the new decade.
Happy new Year.