Peter Yared's Musings

This post was also published on LinkedIn Pulse.  A series on the latent trends that have been accelerated by the Coronavirus Bitcoin advocates have long claimed that Bitcoin was the ultimate hedge against fiat currencies printing unlimited amounts of money. We just experienced this scenario: the U.S. Federal Reserve is buying “unlimited” amounts of debt , and the U.S. Treasury is spiking its debt load to $25 trillion while promising to pay almost nothing in interest . Bitcoin should be spiking relative to the U.S. Dollar due to the debasement of the world’s primary reserve currency. What has actually happened is that the stock market has risen, and Bitcoin has followed the stock market. Inflation increases asset prices and Bitcoin is clearly now a dollar-based asset, much like a tech stock. Especially over the past year, the same type of people that trade Bitcoin also trade tech stocks, and yesterday’s Bitcoin halving had the zeal of a tech stock split. It is now evident that printing

This post was also published on LinkedIn Pulse.  A series on the latent trends that have been accelerated by the Coronavirus Population density and hygiene are the two most important factors in the spread of respiratory illnesses. In a post-Coronavirus world, people are going to be more incented to avoid dense urban centers that were experiencing typhoid outbreaks even before the Coronavirus. The acceleration of Millennials moving to smaller cities There was already a trend, especially amongst the Millennial generation , to move from dense urban centers such as New York, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area to smaller emerging sunbelt cities such as Austin, Raleigh, and Nashville. This trend will accelerate as newly unemployed people move to cheaper locales or back home with their parents. Less densely populated, relatively clean cities are much less likely to be shut down due to future “second wave” outbreaks. Small businesses in smaller sunbelt cities will mostly survive a relatively sho

This post was also published on LinkedIn Pulse.  A series on the latent trends that have been accelerated by the Coronavirus After the widespread fear of a pandemic, people are not going to be inclined to get into a crowded train or other mass transit, and will orient towards more personalized transportation whenever possible. In just the past few years, consumers had already flocked to personalized transportation. Uber and Lyft quickly infiltrated the public consciousness as on demand taxi service. Uber Pool and Lyft Line were introduced shortly afterwards which enabled users to form dynamic carpools, beginning to replace public transportation for a set of more wealthy riders. Lately, on-demand electric bikes and scooter rentals have democratized on-demand, highly personalized transportation. Adding bike lanes for personal electric vehicles and dedicated lanes for carpools is a much cheaper and flexible alternative to restructuring roads or building tunnels to accommodate new or upgra

This post was also published on LinkedIn Pulse.  A series on the latent trends that have been accelerated by the Coronavirus Experts and scientists use hypotheses and models to define their outlook and predictions, which usually are developed, tested and refined over long periods of time. Models can have profound policy implications far beyond experts changing their opinion from don’t wear masks and then to wear masks . With the Cononavirus, we are seeing an unprecedented acceleration of hypotheses and models changing in near real time, leaving heads spinning. The initial Coronavirus models overestimated the death rate by underestimating asymptomatic carriers, and also overestimated the hospitalization rate. The moment that it was clear there was a flawed model was when New York said they needed 30,000 more ventilators and the Federal government said they didn’t. Epidemiologists are scientists, and scientists work with models that are constantly refined. The Governor of New York later

This post was also published on LinkedIn Pulse.  A series on the latent trends that have been accelerated by the Coronavirus The most obvious Corona acceleration is the online-everything trend. Over the next decade, companies were already on their path to a digital transformation to enable most consumer and business transactions online, and with everyone suddenly at home, the trend has rapidly accelerated into the present. The online-everything trend is particularly relevant to emerging countries. Similar to how most of the developed world skipped landlines and went straight to mobile telephony, developing countries that were well on their way to copying Western structures will consider skipping the present and going straight into the future. Financial services Even in the West, many financial services were still in a “come on down to the branch” phase for many interactions including mortgages and wealth management. With these types of interactions no longer possible, consumers have