Where are the jobs going to come from, with the biggest technology companies employing relatively few people? With consumer spending being about 60% of the economy there needs to be well-paying jobs, a strong middle class to support the economy. It is another way in which the sharemarket is divorced from the real economy.
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/rod-orams-june-26-column
In the S&P 500 for example, five stocks account for 20 percent of the index’s market capitalisation – with the other 495 accounting for the other 80 percent. The five – Amazon, Alphabet (parent company of Google), Apple, Facebook and Microsoft – have out-performed the market while helping to drive it up.
But four of those companies have surprisingly few employees. For example, Apple’s staff worldwide numbers only 137,000 and Microsoft’s 151,000. Yet, both have market capitalisations greater than US$1.5 tr. By comparison, back in the early 1960s when stock markets reflected the real economy, AT&T and General Motors employed nearly 1.2 million people combined.