NN Investment Partners: Are you ready for four paradigm shifts?
Imagine what it would take for economies, businesses and societies to get back to where they were before the Covid-19 crisis. Markets would have to ignore the fact that mainly due to new borrowing, debt-to-GDP ratios in the world’s advanced economies will rise by 17 percentage points from 2019 to 2021, following years of relative stability. Voters would have to forget how their governments handled one of the biggest crises in living memory. All the large and small businesses that went bankrupt in the past few months, and all the jobs that were lost with them, would somehow need to come back.
Isn’t it more likely that there will be no returning to the pre-pandemic state of affairs, and that this crisis will act as an accelerator of existing trends and catalyst of new trends? Shouldn’t we be asking ourselves what fundamental shifts might actually take place? In other words, isn’t the crisis likely to turn the world upside down in various respects?