Hacker News Reader

I think you are expressing the problem. The market doesn’t reflect economic reality but instead there are a lot of people who need the markets to stay up so their future is secure.

I am not sure if I agree or disagree but I like where you're going. What is economic reality? That's such a tough definition.

A pessimistic view of the economy would say it is horrible because we now have a 14.7% unemployment rate and this is a record. An optimistic view is in an unprecedented time we have a 85.3% employment rate.

So, what is an economic reality?

One thing I do agree on, the market needs to stay up so as to secure the future of many.

> What is economic reality?

Employment and GDP contracting at historic rates. A pandemic that is not close to being over.

> One thing I do agree on, the market needs to stay up so as to secure the future of many.

So, this is a new thing in the world. It used to be that markets were thought of as a fair playing field* on which price discovery and capital allocation happens. Sometimes markets would go down - a lot - and that was okay. For most people, the market and the economy are separate. The market could crash - as it did in Oct 1987 - without that spilling over too much into the economy at large. Certainly when the market skyrockets the wealth of households below p90 are not dramatically affected.

So now, what are markets? Not a fair playing field for price discovery and capital allocation, but something else. And if they're something else, how should we view the long-term prospects for markets to really do anything meaningful at all? Are they just going to keep going up forever, entirely divorced from the performance of the businesses that comprise them? Seems like we're steaming for the icebergs if that is the way forward.

* = yes, I know they were never truly fair.

> Employment and GDP contracting at historic rates. A pandemic that is not close to being over.

I think you've made my point, this is a short term reality, and a pessimistic one. We don't have a model for the long term economic reality of this situation. We only have speculation and guessing. So we have a short term economic reality but nothing more.

To say that the US stock market hasn't historically effected the economy at large seems to forget the Great Depression. I believe it is taken as economic fact that the Great Depression started with the crash of the stock market in 1929. There was quite a bit of speculation and the market went up and down all over the place, but finally settled with a huge amount of unemployment and a massive reduction in GDP. We have put into place numerous measures to make sure that doesn't happen again, and we are using them, effectively.

Also, I disagree that the markets are entirely divorced from the performance of the businesses that comprise them. Most people don't look at the entire market. We look at indexes. Look at the DJIA. With the exception of Nike, Disney, and Boeing, which of the 30 companies in the index are hit hard by this pandemic? If anything, which of those companies are increasing substantially before of the pandemic? They aren't steaming towards an iceberg. They a solid, recession resistant conglomerates that have substantial production power.

We are all dependent on a variety of complex systems to maintain our standard of living; the stock market is just one of those systems, and it is one of the most highly-visible, and widely reported.

How is that not reality?

For most people reality is to have a secure job and income. The stock market doesn’t reflect that reality. The fact that it’s going up helps only a minority of the people.

Cities and States rely on the market for their pension funds. CA has ~$2 trillion in underfunded obligations ($83K per household)[1]. If the market doesn't magically make up the difference, the state will in the form of new taxes, budget cuts, and restructuring - or it can just go into a debt spiral like Illinois and default in 30 years.

Universities rely on the market for their endowments ($500 billionish). When the market goes down, tuition goes up.

~60 million Americans have a 401K worth about $6 trillion. Many of those people are approaching retirement or have already retired.

> The fact that it’s going up helps only a minority of the people.

You may not be directly helped, but you will definitely feel the pain (eventually) when it goes down.

1. https://us.pensiontracker.org/stateSummary.php?idcode=06

>You may not be directly helped, but you will definitely feel the pain (eventually) when it goes down.

Inflating assets by printing dollars greatly hurts the lower socioeconomic classes by devaluing the only thing they have which is dollars.

Yes, but a large enough segment of voters demand their asset prices keep rising, so that’s the reality of what the government will do.

Also, the governments themselves are so deeply invested in rising asset prices that their budgets will blow up due to not having money for their defined benefit pension promises.

Exactly. The market reflects the needs of the participants and gets manipulated that way. It’s not a fact based assessment of economic health.

Yes, the market is asset prices, so it's only going to reflect the reality of asset prices.

Unfortunately, statistics such as how many children get nutritional food or the number of hours parents get to spend with their children or how many families get to eat dinner together aren't optimized for.

The performance of financial markets represents an abstract value based on speculation. Stock prices derive from demand that buyers have for those equities. The basis of stock price from the fundamental performance of the underlying company is becoming dwarfed by the belief that the shares have intrinsic value.

The stock market is not the economy. Jobs market and employment numbers are a better indicator. If the common citizen is unemployed, they won’t have money to spend, business will go bust, and it just makes its way up the chain bringing down the whole system.

Real indication of what we should do? Well I can give you my slant. The current monetary tools date back to the depression. The Fed uses two tools: the Fed Funds rate and the secondary repo market. That was fine back in the day when banks drove the economy by making loans. (Remember 'It's a Wonderful Life' with Jimmy Stewart?) There were no credit cards then. No smart phones with internet access to your bank account. The world has moved on but the Fed has not. Banks have morphed into 'financial institutions' and they want to maximize their ROI. So any money they get from Uncle Sam certainly doesn't trickle to retail, rather it goes into equities markets. You get more and more dollars chasing fewer and fewer equities (I am simplifying here-there are a lot more financial tools than equities including bonds, REITS, bitcoin, the dark pools, hedge funds,etc). But the bottom line is you get 'equity inflation'.

The money from the Fed needs to go to the people who will spend it. THAT is what an economy is - when people spend money to get goods and services. Now we have the infrastructure to do this. We need to give every taxpayer a Fed account. When the Fed wants to move the economy (and I mean the REAL economy, the place where people spend the hours of their lives) they need to get the money to the people who will spend it - the consumers. So they could make a monthly stipend to your Fed account. This Fed coin would have a 'half-life' encouraging you to use it before you lose it. Once spent, the actual amount is fixed.

At the very least, we need to get a better handle on our 'gross financial product' as a separate and distinct measure from our gross domestic product. When I read that our GDP increased but we have more unemployment than ever, I think there is some financial trickery going on.

Just because everyone dumps their savings in the stock market doesn't make it any more functional. I think it's obvious by now, considering the actions of the Fed, that the market is propped-up. The debate is actually whether this action is good to the broad economy. A pro argument would sound much like yours - because many people's life savings went into 401k it would be a disaster to let it fall (read be accurately priced). The cons is that this disproportionately helps the upper echelons of society, further increasing inequality - main street gets mostly decimated.

There was a good analogy I read some days ago by someone on HN:

> Equity markets are not supposed to be so timid that they hide behind the skirts of grandma and cling to grandpa's legs. The picture is more like they're holding a gun to your grandparents' heads.

So basically protecting your life savings is now entirely correlated with speculators winning big. This wouldn't be a problem if we'd all be winning and the pie was large enough for everyone but it definitely is not and it's going in the wrong direction.