Scholarship table
2019 Median $22,217. Vanguard analysis.https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/average-401k-balance
What a broad and largely baseless claim from Gates. “More than 50% of business travel will disappear post-COVID”. Just absolutely asininehttps://twitter.com/jjjinvesting/status/1328899829200773122?s=21But I’m not surprised at all from a completely detached billionaire who hasn’t dealt directly with clients on a day to day in decades and who has very vested interest in further growth and demand for video conferencing and remote work software.
I don't know about travel, but I would hate to be heavily invested in office space right now. Why pay thousands of dollars in rent for an employee who has demonstrated that they can do their job perfectly well at home?
But the whole assumption that business travel is some frivolity that can be easily replaced by a video chat or Zoom is just so pervasive the last 6 months, and a flawed assumption.
I can agree with that. I think office arrangements and commercial space will be transformed in some significant ways. But the whole assumption that business travel is some frivolity that can be easily replaced by a video chat or Zoom is just so pervasive the last 6 months, and a flawed assumption. Hell, WebEx and video chat has existed for well over a decade. And it’s not like businesses and economies are thriving and running hot right now, proving that travel was unnecessary. Interchanging “helpful to bridge the gap and get by in a crisis” with “the new standard” is awful presumptuous.I guess I’m more just irked about stuff like this that does nothing to help strategize about how to solve forthcoming dilemmas in getting back going, but rather incites panic that business won’t be able to return to prior ways or levels without some massive overhaul in a fundamental component, in the face of enough other headwinds already
You're not wrong, but I don't think Gates is either. I don't know your profession (I probably should pay more attention and know by now), but I'd guess about 50% of business travel was frivolous - and that's the drop Gates is seeing. Certainly I see that in my industry. Of course, it depends on timeframe - as the amount of frivolous business travel seems to go in decade-ish long cycles. So for the next 3 years - including a vaccine - I think businesses making their numbers is still going to be hard. And travel expenditures will be scrutinized heavily - and thus drop. But still half the pre-pandemic trips will happen - as you note they need to - and thus - "both sides" And I think you're way over the top on this inciting panic. It's really just trying to understand how this is going to affect business travel related (dependent?) organizations. A vaccine is great, but it's not some switch that's going to make the world go back to Oct 2019. There's a world of hurt to fix before we can get back there.
You're right. Business travel won't disappear, but I guarantee you it will decline. Instead of going to conferences in person like I have every year, I have attended online training, and its just as valuable and 5x cheaper.Will executives still travel to secure big deals? Sure. But the average worker bee will travel MUCH less, if at all.
If you agree on the bolded you have to expect that a significant amount of business travel will be gone. A lot of business travel was to these large "office headquarters". To get people together at a central site. If the large "headquarters" model dissipates, there is no central site to get together, instead the logical central site is on zoom.That won't apply to all industries, but there certainly is a strong possibility that it is pervasive in enough industries to significantly impact business travel.
Lockdown vs stimulushttps://youtu.be/k0O6Ttjp0fs
Business travel will certainly decrease, the question is how much.Tangential to this is the question of whether further airline consolidation is likely. A year ago I would have said there's no way from an antitrust perspective but you have airlines hemorrhaging money and jobs right now. I could see any of the following possibilities happening to create synergies and economies of scale...Any of the Legacy big 3 (United, Delta, American) buying a JetBlue or FrontierA JetBlue-Alaska mergerSouthwest buying Spirit or Frontier
Anecdotal admittedly, but I expect my company to travel about 33% less going forward (have small consulting company). We were travelling 75%. I think we have proven to clients that 50% is doable.
Whether 47 percent or 51 percent of 55 percent of the public owns stock kinda misses the point, because the vast majority of those people own very little stock.The fact is that the top 10 percent of households by net worth own about 88 percent of the market.So when people point to the market as an indicator of economic, what they're really saying is that the economy is good for the already wealthy.