As if he isn't just guessing like anyone else. When can we stop printing headlines about random people's stock market predictions? There should be a website that gathers these headlines for display along a timeline of various economic indicators.
He isn't a random person, he's the CEO of one of the biggest companies on Earth, of course he will have some more insight into his own industry than some random person here or elsewhere. Stocks don't have to go up even during a decent economy, we've lived in a unique era where they have, but that hasn't always been the case.
I strongly disagree. You could find a thousand headlines of executives making market predictions that were completely wrong. This is a total illusion.
Two years? Man that's an eternity. Imagine making a two-year prediction in 1999 (dot-com crash, 9/11), 2007 (recession, series of financial catastrophes), 2015 (trump elected), 2019 (covid)...
These companies have huge swathes of cash that need to be managed. Google for example has a large team of (renowned, fwiw) economists, among them Hal Varian [1], doing among other things revenue forecasts which would take the state of the economy into account. I would hazard a guess that MS (and thus its CEO) does have more insight into the economy than a random person.
Does absolutely not mean that economists are necessarily great at forecasting, but they are professionals fwiw.
CEOs have a much stronger motive to predict things that are convenient for their company than they have secret insights or expertise about the global economy.
It's interesting that last summer Elon said he had "a really bad feeling" and now Satya is making economic predictions. How much information to these tech companies really have were they can extract/forecast economic trends?
I think the cloud, ads, search, and very large ecommerce companies have a lot of economic data and a lot more realtime than most other organizations.
Imagine the picture you can put together if you see trends in cloud usage and orders, ad buys, search trends for shopping and other econ indicators (layoffs, unemployment, job hunting, COBRA), and actual shopping transaction volume. Many of these you can see change by the minute.
Microsoft probably have also pretty good idea just how many computers running their operating system is being sold or licensed. What are the licensing numbers for Office suite and 365. Outlook and AD seats, Teams.
They should actually have pretty unique view to just about how most companies on the planet or in at the least in the West are doing or looking to do from employee numbers.
I would imagine most of the very large companies have a treasury group that's managing their excess cash etc and that those people are probably offering lots of opinions on general economic direction. Couple that with contact with lots of their peer group doing the same, the economic consulting groups they're all hiring and contact with a bunch of bankers and I'd assume they'd start feeling they have an opinion. Add to that what they see in their own business when they're broad enough and I'd see why they'd start expounding on the topic
These companies have large amounts of cash and cash-flow/revenue that need to be managed, so they have at least a few people working on thus full-time (or whole teams, e.g. Google). I wouldn't be surprised if these world's largest companies have about as much info in aggregate as many large hedge funds (in some ways less, more in others).
Just a guess, that's all this is. Year 2022 has taught us that even the most worshipped CEOs are not necessarily as smart as people like to think. Zuckerberg thought Metaverse was a great idea, Musk thought buying twitter would be great and we already know what happened to Sam Fried. We need to stop worshipping CEOs like they are gods. They exist just to maximize company's bottomline and minimize workers pay.
i don't really worship anybody like that, but some of the people you dumped into the same category were scammers, others have actually built something very concrete of value. Satya, as far as I know, managed to turn Microsoft around after a very bizarre rule of Ballmer, so I know he's not a complete idiot and probably has something interesting to say.
Why the wholly negative reaction to this mild mannered comment? It is even flagged now. I think the overreaction here is more interesting than what Nadella said
Weird that this got on the front page but there weren't any submissions about the historically low unemployment rate. Perhaps there's a negativity bias on this forum?
I suspect that it's the forum's tech-centricity more than anything. After a decade-plus of tech outrunning the broader economy, the roles have reversed, and folks in the industry don't know what to make of it.
If I’ve learned anything in the past 2.5 years, it’s that nobody can predict the stock market. You might as well be telling me the exact day Jesus is going to return.
