All the Lockdown darlings, Ubereats, amazon, may have some disappointing results in a couple quarters. Will Mr. market care? I don't know.
One of the things I've seen pointed out is that it's mainly small and medium sized businesses which have contracted the most or gone bankrupt. The big companies - the ones most likely to be listed on the stock markets - are the ones that are winning all that business which has been lost from small businesses. This is potentially one of those situations where it's made clear that the stock market isn't the economy. This can be a situation where the economy is floundering, but if it's a transfer of wealth away from small businesses and onto the balance sheet of big, publicly listed companies, that still means stocks can go up while the economy overall goes down. The classic K-shaped divergence we've been hearing about for a year or so now.
Now is that what's going to continue into 2021, 2022 and beyond? I have no idea, but I suspect so. Big companies are the ones best able to benefit from the all-digital world, where small businesses still rely so heavily on classic business practices like having physical shop or office space and attracting customers to physically visit. It's a fast changing world and I'm actually not sure how well small businesses can compete, at least in this climate.
Related though, I watched an interesting Economics Explained video on youtube about New Zealand. They have one of the highest rates of self-employment in the world due to streamlining the process of starting businesses rather than having a congress that caters to the big businesses with the most lobbying dollars. I feel like it's still debatable if there's simply certain things that it's easier to get away with on a remote island of 5 million than the massive 500 million population NAFTA zone and all it's mega businesses and cheap global trade but if things need to change in the US to help rebalance the gap between rich and poor, perhaps changing the laws to favor small businesses over big businesses would help. It feels really unfair that in the US, small businesses seem to pay far higher taxes than the biggest businesses which have armies of accountants and global networks of subsidies to conceal their wealth with.