President-elect Biden and the 117th Congress must craft bipartisan infrastructure legislation early in the new administration. We’ll focus on public infrastructure since the market for financing private infrastructure is efficient. “Amtrak Joe,” who regularly commuted during his years in the Senate, is well aware of the need for innovation in financing public infrastructure.

For citizens and investors across the globe, 2020 was a year of uncertainty or worse — and better forgotten. But for owners or purveyors of cryptocurrencies and related digital tokens, 2020 marked a year of solid gains, measured in simple returns, in stature of the asset class and in investor acceptance.

2020 will be a year that lives in the minds of energy business executives for decades to come. For traditional energy executives, it will be a year of infamy; for clean-energy executives, a year when renewables demonstrated resilience and staying power in the face of uncertainty.

Big data keeps getting bigger. And faster. And more valuable. Consider that 90 percent of all data was created in the past two years; then try to imagine that by 2025 worldwide data is expected to hit 175 zettabytes. To put that in perspective, if you were to store 175 zettabytes on DVDs, your stack would be long enough to circle Earth 222 times. Processing, housing, streaming and securing all that data has given rise to the evolving modern data center. The elements that appeal most to investors today include:

Fueled by strong consumer demand, legal sales in cannabis for medical and recreational use are projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 21 percent, to reach more than $41 billion by 2025 (from $13.2 billion in 2019), according to a report from New Frontier Data titled Cannabis in America for 2021 & Beyond: A New Normal in Consumption and Demand. Monthly consumer spending increased by an average of $149 between March and October in 14 legal markets analyzed.

Talk to me about business and investing for more than 10 minutes and I start speaking in future tense — about emerging technologies such as virtual reality, quantum computing, gene therapy and advanced forms of energy such as hydrogen and nuclear fusion. It isn’t just that I find these subjects fascinating, it’s that they’re driving the future of business, and awareness of them is critical to successful long-term investing. The maxim goes like this: “Investing isn’t about where we are today, it’s about where we will be tomorrow.”

Emerging from a tumultuous 2020, investors face a number of challenges. For long-term investors the environment of historically low yields continues. Many traditional fixed-income strategies are not generating the income investors need. At the same time, 2020 exposed social and economic inequalities that fostered greater interest and demand for impact investing. In fact, many investors now look to use their capital not just to generate positive financial returns but to also provide positive impact in the communities they live and work in, particularly as we embark on a post-COVID recovery.

Amy Lynch, who has spent 25-plus years as a compliance professional and regulator with the SEC and FINRA, is founder and president of FrontLine Compliance, a consultancy to investment firms. We asked her to comment on the new SEC rule intended to expand the ability of investment firms and funds to advertise their products and services to investors.

One would be hard pressed to find an asset class of greater interest to investors these days than infrastructure, as people seek hard assets capable of performing well during times of rising inflation and interest rates. Indeed, other than during equity bull markets, infrastructure has delivered better returns by capturing more upside than bonds and less downside than either equities or bonds.

For the 36th consecutive year, Blackstone vice chairman Byron Wien has issued his predictions for the top 10 surprises for 2021, and this time he has collaborated with Joe Zidle, chief investment strategist of private wealth solutions. Wien defines a “surprise” as an event that the average investor would only assign a one-in-three chance of coming to pass, but which he believes is “probable,” having a better than 50 percent likelihood of happening. Wien began the tradition in 1986 when he was the chief U.S. investment strategist at Morgan Stanley. He joined Blackstone in September 2009 as a senior adviser to both the firm and its clients in analyzing economic, political, market and social trends. In 2018, Zidle joined Wien in the development of the 10 surprises list.

Roundtable: If you could go back in time, what would you want to tell the 25-year-old version of yourself?

In 2017, the bipartisan legislation creating the qualified opportunity zones (QOZ) program made the investment world giddy with excitement. This was more than just a subsidized lending program, as nearly all previous incentive programs had been. This legislation created the ability to raise qualified opportunity zone private equity funds, where private investment-type returns might possibly be realized, while making use of capital gains tax incentives and other tax deferrals to further boost returns. The goal was to make private investing in economically distressed communities too attractive to pass up, and thus turn these areas into vibrant growth zones where people would want to live, work, play and invest.

Though vaccines are being rolled out across the United States to combat COVID-19 and get people back to traditional workspaces, those who shifted to home offices are likely to continue in that mode for months, or even permanently. There are indications that many firms may continue remote work strategies even after unfettered by public health concerns.

It has been quite a year for those of us in the investment world — mostly fascinating, frequently challenging, and occasionally frustrating. The COVID-19 pandemic, and subsequent effects on markets and global economies, has been directly or indirectly responsible for much of this, accelerating areas ripe for change, causing societal shifts with rippling impacts in many ways, including on the value of real estate.

As the maxim goes, the quickest way to a man’s heart (or a woman’s) is through his stomach. Similarly, it appears the quickest way to get higher rental rates from tenants is also through their stomachs. It’s called the Whole Foods Effect, which has shown that apartment buildings with a Whole Foods Market on the ground floor commands higher rents from tenants.