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I'm no seasoned economic analyst or economic thinker, but a lot of posts in this and related subreddits got me thinking. I see people musing over the beaten down prices of SAAS and consumer cyclicals and an implicit assumption that the divergence of these sectors and AI-related sectors will eventually lessen.
But what if it doesn't? 250 years ago, agriculture was the dominant form of wealth production and employment. It's still around, obviously, but its relative weight in global equities and as a share of the labor force is a tiny fraction of what it once was. That's not a direct corollary to what's happening with AI & automation, but it's hard to draw a direct one because this technological revolution isn't just redistributing human labor - it's potentially eliminating it as a necessary input to the productive process.
So is this what investors are potentially eyeing, over the very, *very* long term? I'll see the occasional recognition of this possibility with people saying "it's self-defeating because who will these companies sell to if no one is employed anymore?"
The answer, I think, is that they won't - not to you and I, at least. We'll live in a highly stratified economy dominated by B2B & B2G sales, with a handful of wealthy luxury consumers, a massive underclass subsisting on UBI, and an increasingly small middle class.
I'm not suggesting that AI is going to wipe out, say, accountants as a career field within the next 5 years, but once it does, that's it. They're gone. Who in their right mind would want to own Robert Half in that scenario? Or restauranteurs targeting the middle class?
All of this has been said a thousand time before with more eloquence, but I rarely see it connected to the stock market and the decreased size & purchasing power of the global middle class. None of this will happen overnight, but buying a lot of these beaten down names at the present strikes me as similar to investing in plow manufacturers in 1920. Who cares if current FCF looks great?