Sat, 22 Jan 2022 07:50:13 +0000
Geopolitical and economic tension in the broader China–U.S. narrative will continue to increase and "swell" over the coming decade or two (the 2020s and into the 2030s).
“I was just trying to highlight where I think everything is headed over the next decade or two, independent of what are obvious human rights issues going on.” View on YouTube
US-China geopolitical and economic tensions have continued to increase in the years since this January 2022 prediction.
Some version of the bipartisan antitrust bill that just passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee (referenced as the bill to "rewrite some of these anti-competitive" rules, with a 75–25 committee vote) will be passed by the full U.S. Congress and become law in the near term (within the current legislative session following this January 2022 recording).
“so it's I think some version of that is going to pass.” View on YouTube
The bipartisan antitrust bill (AICOA) that passed the Senate Judiciary Committee never received a floor vote and did not become law.
The proposed Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard announced in January 2022 will receive regulatory approval and close, without being blocked on antitrust grounds.
“I still think this Microsoft Activision deal, on balance gets done because if you take the absolute values away from it, the reality is that it's an adjacent part of Microsoft's core business, and there's nothing fundamentally monopolistic about what would happen if you let Microsoft and Activision come together.” View on YouTube
The Microsoft-Activision Blizzard acquisition closed in October 2023 after regulatory approval, without being blocked.
In response to the Biden administration’s evolving antitrust posture as of early 2022, many large U.S. technology companies will materially reduce or pause significant M&A activity until there is greater clarity on enforcement standards.
“I think this administration is creating tremendous business uncertainty. I think the reaction of a lot of big tech companies is it's going to be to stop doing M&A until the situation gets clarified, because they just don't know.” View on YouTube
Tech M&A activity did slow somewhat amid regulatory uncertainty in 2022, though it was not a uniform, complete pause across the industry.
From the vantage point of late January 2022, there is a material risk that the Federal Reserve will overreact to incomplete inflation data by tightening too aggressively, causing the US economy to enter a recession within the subsequent couple of years.
“We are in a really complicated moment. And I think the risk is that there is an overreaction to incomplete data. And we plunge the US economy into a recession.” View on YouTube
The US saw two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth in 2022, though the NBER never officially declared a recession for that period.
As of January 2022, the high‑growth tech stock drawdown is about 80–90% complete, implying that most of the price declines in that sector will have occurred within roughly the next 1–3 months.
“We're in the eighth in my opinion. I think we're in the eighth inning of of the tech drawdown.” View on YouTube
The tech stock drawdown was far from 80-90% complete in January 2022; the Nasdaq continued declining for most of 2022, bottoming around October, well beyond the predicted 1-3 month window.
From the January 2022 level, if large-cap US tech stocks (the "big tech generals" that dominate the indices) fall an additional ~10–15%, that move will mark or closely coincide with the bottom of the broader equity-market selloff, after which most of the drawdown pain will be over.
“When you see this thing really get cracked is when those folks, you know, trade down another 10 or 15%. And then I think we're kind of through most of the pain.” View on YouTube
Large-cap tech stocks fell substantially more than 10-15% further from January 2022 levels before the market found its ultimate bottom in October 2022.
Implicitly, the continued pattern of Covid-driven school closures like those in Flint, Michigan in early 2022 will lead to significant long-term negative consequences for affected students that will be evident when outcomes are evaluated in the following decades.
“We saw another implication just this week in Flint, Michigan... I think, like, we have to have an honest accounting of, um, of all of these things because the implications are real.” View on YouTube
Pandemic-era school closures have been widely documented to cause significant, lasting learning loss for affected students, evident in subsequent years of test score data.
Roughly 20 years after the Covid-19 pandemic (i.e., in the 2040s), the dominant retrospective assessment will be that pandemic-era learning loss among children was the largest long-term cost of the crisis, outweighing other social and economic costs when historians and policymakers look back.
“This is really the accounting of the cost. And we are, as we've said before, learning loss in our kids is going to be the single biggest thing we look back in 20 years coming out of this pandemic and realize was the biggest price we paid for this.” View on YouTube
This is a roughly 20-year retrospective prediction (around the 2040s) that has not yet arrived.