Do any of these article headlines sound familiar?
- Travel and Hospitality Stocks Experience Ripple Effect of COVID-19 Pandemic
- Global Events Cause Ripple Effect in Energy Sector Stocks
- Economic Indicators Send Ripples Through Banking Stocks
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The last time we read these headlines collectively, we were all in lockdown at home, while the pandemic raged through our everyday lives. It disrupted the way we lived and interacted with the world. Yet here we are, 3 years later, with life having gone back to some semblance of normalcy. This entire phenomenon we went through is called “The rock in the pond” syndrome – an event which causes ripple effects in the short term but over time, the ripples start to dissipate and the pond goes back to being still.
During the early stages of the pandemic, we all thought that this was how life was going to be. This is the “new normal”. Nobody was ever going to watch a movie in the theatre again, nobody would fly anywhere ever again. Netflix and Zoom were the only two apps we needed. Airlines took a massive hit to their top lines, and PVR had to raise another round of debt just to survive.
Yet, here we are today. Airline tickets are skyrocketing to higher than pre-pandemic levels and movie theatres are full, irrespective of which movie is going on. People want to make up for the lost time of the pandemic and are spending even more on such experiences. “Revenge travel” became the new buzzword of 2022. Life moved on as the ripples slowly went away.
So, what did we learn from this? For starters – even if the ripples seem overwhelming in the short term, in any aspect of life, we must know that they’re temporary. Nothing is permanent, not even something as global and severe as the pandemic!
