Once upon a time there was… Well, an Old World which two-thirds of the UK population – those not into their mid-50s – will fail to comprehend and could not possibly want to live in. A time when if you wanted to do practically anything you had to go ‘on chance’ and before setting off, be mindful of hardly helpful restrictive opening hours. In advance of an excursion, one had to book by telephone, often a communal one. Make reservations with a sturdy fixed-line phone with a mechanical dialling mechanism – which had no sentient memory – and no certainty the call would be answered. If you were not at your place of work you were almost wholly unproductive, with nothing remotely like access to devices and connectivity to work on the move or from home. It was an Old World where inventory management was little advanced from a century before. Extremes of under and over stocking proving costly and so too the shrinkage invited by poor stock controls. The Old World was, in short, a time and place where fixed and human capital was not used to its profitable optimum, and neither the monetary capital employed: firms were commercially frustrated by their failure to fully match their optimal capacity with custom. 

The two economic worlds I consider diametrically opposite are those before we had new generation communications and the internet of things – the Old World – and the New one we have come to enjoy. The end of once all too often ‘dead time’ for fixed assets and human capital meant the dawn of far better utilisation of financial capital. It resulted in a structural reduction in cyclically adjusted average inflation and, in turn, a structural and irreversible ratchet lower in interest rates along the entire yield curve.