The Iran war: O’Hanley says the war is triggering a realignment of capital flows, especially with the $3.2 trillion that the Gulf states and sovereign wealth funds have deployed. “They’re ripping angry at [Iran] and they’re quite concerned about the rhetoric coming out of the U.S. because the only thing worse than the situation now would be a failed state with 90-plus million people. We haven’t seen anything like it elsewhere in the world,” he told me. “I personally worry about what happens if this goes on much longer. It’s the second-order products that don’t get the headlines…Fertilizer is a big one. The people I talk to on this, their fingers crossed, feel like the world will get through this year because a lot of the fertilizer was already in the supply chain. But you could have a [crisis] situation during next year’s planting season, largely outside the U.S.”
Tech’s winners and losers: “AI is taking away tasks, not jobs. If you want to put it in baseball terms, we’re in the first inning in terms of how you take advantage of this technology and deploy it. It’s still a toss-up whether the incumbents are going to win or the new entities. Incumbents have a lot of reasons to win—because of data, the moat, and the relationships,” he said. And he argues the spotlight on digital assets is misplaced. “Crypto gets all the attention but what’s going to be more meaningful is just the digitalization of assets—whether it’s money market funds, tokenization of them, the ability to actually take a piece of property, tokenize it, and enable on the blockchain…and enable the investment in it—not just the initial investment, but more importantly, the secondary market for these assets.”
