Why should I take the markets seriously? It's just a bunch of rich people in the end.
Now of course what is good for top companies may not be good for individuals, so you can't just say that a stock price increase means people's lives are going to be better. But I think you can say that a stock market increase means the news you are seeing is more likely to be important.
The market is a weighted function of an insane number of variables, and we know none of the weights. Any attempt at reading the market to understand those variables is going to be about as useful as trying to observe butterflies by looking at hurricanes.
This obviously excludes strategies based on fraud, misinforming the public, etc.
I could say the markets are up due to the vaccine news, or because the US election was called and people are seeking stability, or because the US election was called and the market prefers biden, or because investors are pricing in a Trump 2024 run, or because people just expected it to go up after any of those things, or because a collection of automated trading bots saw some arcane pattern in the data which has no real-world relevancy but they nevertheless have been trained to buy. None of those predictions are falsifiable.
There's potential for a huge gain in efficiency here. The stock market is fundamentally a long bet (if you want to short the entire market you invest in things outside it). Of course the market is exited at the long term prospects of that.
Also, you're being a little disingenuous when yo say "These are the same markets that cheer when job cuts and redundancies are announced." When one under-performing company cuts jobs it tends to go up because costs are decreased. When a well performing company announces a mass layoff it tends to be a toss up because signals are mixed. When a ton of companies announce layoffs the market tanks because the signal being sent is things are getting worse all around. You're comparing a positive reaction to a single entity event (company announces layoffs) to a positive reaction for a market wide event (potential for covid to become less of a burden on the economy as a whole). You can't cross compare as if they're 1:1 like that.
IMHO this supports the OPs point, which is that the stock market in its current incarnation does not care about the lives of human beings.
Which is unacceptable. We collectively have enough creativity and intelligence figure out how to have a stock which can not only reflect corporate profit but also human well-being.
I think it begins by acknowledging market externalities - pollution being one of them - which allow for activities which are profitable within the shared fiction of the market, but which are, in our broader shared reality, ultimately destructive.
The Happinese/Well-being GDP also seems like an interesting idea.
I do agree that using the stock market as an indicator of quality of life, general well being of human beings or anything else than the financial viability of publicly traded companies is not a very good idea. That's a frequent mistake made by financial journalists and politicians alike, however, especially during election season.
I disagree that a lot of people are invested in the stock market. Statistically, it's very few people.
Our pensions might be nothing to the top earners of the country but that doesn't mean they're nothing to each one of us individually.
In this case, no one probably bothers to dig deeper, it's the BBC and it's good enough, everyone will think the world will soon be rid of Covid, so they will buy stocks, so I should also join the up wave...
All things die, including businesses. Layoffs can be a good thing if the job is terrible, the business is a zombie. Can you imagine working at Sears? It's good to let bad businesses die because the alternative is worse. That said, humans like to get settled, comfortable, get a rhythm to life, and changing jobs (because of a business failure or whatever) is a HUGE stressor. And its uncertain if you don't know where you can "plug in" to the economy and get a job, so you're in a rush, and new employers rush you through onboarding and acquire all kinds of legal leverage over you, and so on.... And the American worker is not trained to examine their options from any perspective other than "Job Title" and "Salary". Even "Benefits" often get short shrift.
Anyway, long ramble short, you don't have to admire the minds that move money, but you should take them seriously. It's worth considering, though: what would it take to have your cake and eat it too? How would you make the "markets" more admirable, which in your case seems to mean "more moral"?
Is your position to never lay off anyone ever?
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/economi...
seriously tho, hackernews demographic is upper middle class white men. The ones who benefit most from capitalism.
There actually used to be a lot more posts about the stock market than there are now. So I guess there’s a little more diversity now.
The election is over. You can stop peddling bs.
Thus far in 2020, Gallup finds 55% of Americans reporting that they own stock, based on polls conducted in March and April. This is identical to the average 55% recorded in 2019 and similar to the average of 54% Gallup has measured since 2010.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...