Revenge of the real

The second lesson is that we are in an age when those “hard industries” matter. Yes, Big Tech stocks have soared in recent years amid excitement about AI. But the Iran war shows that countries are very vulnerable if they lack industrial processes, however old-fashioned. “The old economy begins to take its revenge,” Jeff Currie, analyst at the US private capital group Carlyle, recently noted. “You can’t print molecules,” even with AI.