META Jan 2025 300.000 call

Rate cuts plus innovation equals 'magic' for tech: Analyst

Goldman Sachs managing director Kash Rangan sits down with Brian Sozzi and Madison Mills at the Goldman Sachs 2024 Communacopia and Technology Conference to discuss the Tech sector's outlook as the Federal Reserve kicks off its rate-easing cycle. "With every economic cycle, as we come out of an economic cycle, coincidentally, there's always a new tech cycle that also goes with it," Rangan tells Yahoo Finance. He explains that after the 2008 recession, tech companies came out with cloud products, which eventually became "the catalyzing force for the tech industry." He notes that for real growth, there needs to be innovation alongside economic improvement: "It's not as easy as saying lower rates are good. I mean, they're kind of the first lift. It's the primer. The next thing, it has to be followed by real innovation." At this moment for tech, he believes "this game is about capital." Cloud, just like AI, was "capital-intensive," Rangan explains, and if companies like Microsoft (MSFT) and Adobe (ADBE) hadn't listened to investors, he argues that they wouldn't have the massive cloud businesses they have today. He adds, "Now we're augmenting human capital, I don't know, $20, $30 trillion? That installed base of human capital is far more valuable. That's cognition capital than compute capital. So this cycle, if done well, is going to be huge." For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Market Domination. This post was written by Melanie Riehl