As we put the finishing touches on another issue of Private Wealth, the stock market has been busy showing its human side.
Fear and indecision are dominating the market this week, with China’s stock market crash, Europe’s sinking economy and other worries—real and imagined—inducing a six-day selloff in the U.S.
The ups and downs have been stomach-churning, and at the end of the day, it’s been mostly downs—meaning that many of you have probably been busy talking to clients to reassure them that the market was due for a correction and that it’s not time to panic, and to remind them of the long investment journey ahead.
Considering the current fixation on short-term thinking, it’s somewhat fitting that we feature a story by Michael Fischer in this issue about what may be the mother of all long-horizon investments: fusion energy. As anyone who watched Doc Brown throw a banana peel and beer into his flying DeLorean’s fuel tank in Back To The Future knows, fusion power is going to change society someday—providing us with cheap, abundant, clean power that will forever free us from our dependency on destructive fossil fuels.
The thing to remember about fusion power, of course, is that researchers say it’s 10 years away from being viable as a cheap source of energy. The second thing to remember is that it was 10 years away 10 years ago, and probably 10 years before that, and so on. The running joke about fusion is that it’s always the power of the future, although such difficulties should come as no surprise considering scientists are trying to harness an atomic chain reaction that essentially creates a miniature sun here on Earth.
So what’s new with fusion research that has prompted us to write about it? On the surface, not a whole lot. As Fischer points out, we’ve had a flurry of announcements recently by companies large and small boasting of new research milestones that will lead to fusion power reactors going online in—yes, you guessed it—about 10 years.
What does deserve some attention, however, are some of the prominent people who have been investing in the technology, including Microsoft co-founder and Seattle Seahawks owner Paul Allen and Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. Do millions in investments by celebrities such as these mean that game-changing advances have finally been achieved by fusion power researchers? Or will Bezos’s bet on fusion turn into another Amazon Fire Phone escapade?
I suppose we’ll have to see how things develop over the next 10 years, but the private investment activity is encouraging since government funding of fusion research has been scant when weighed against the potential benefits of the technology.
Maybe politicians need the same lesson in long-term thinking as do many investors.
