Might tech super-firms mean the Great Stagnation is over?

I am now giving this a chance of somewhat over 50 (!) percent, and that is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column.  Here is one bit:

Gross domestic product growth for the last two quarters was over 3 percent, even in light of hurricane damage in August and September, and middle-class income growth has resumed. You might think that would mean high price inflation from credit growth and “overheating,” but the 12-month change in core prices for personal consumption expenditures has fallen to 1.3 percent.

And:

Low rates of inflation, however, reflect productivity gains that already are here. The tech giants — Google, Amazon.com Inc., Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc. — have become major managers of our information, our businesses and our lives. They’re meeting political resistance, but whatever you think of those complaints, they are signs the major tech companies are having transformative effects. I used to say that we are overrating what tech has done for us to date, and underrating what it will do in the future. Perhaps reality has caught up with that prognostication.

And:

The major tech companies are growing their platforms quickly, supporting low prices with scale, product diversity, data ownership and superior service. Hardly anyone today worries about the eventual disappearance of competition and monopoly prices from Amazon or the other major tech companies. Do you really think Amazon is going to double book prices five years from now?…The tech companies have shown that their radical model of low price, high market share, high quality rapid expansion will keep them profitable for a long time to come.

Big if true, as they say…do read the whole thing.  The still-remaining negative possibility, of course, is that the current positive wave is like 1995-1998, and we will sink back to less positive economic times, as we did back then.

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