Ask HN: Why is stock market booming when the economy is struggling?

The valuations are in part a leading indicator of inflation, as governments print money. It's no good having cash, buy a stream of inflation adjusted revenue.

Also whatever the opposite of trickle down economics is. As more concentrated wealth chases investment opportunities, prices go up.

The fed, "quantitative easing" (aka money printing), zero % interest rates, resulting inflation in asset prices (stocks, crypto, housing etc).

Is the economy struggling?

Consumer spending has completely rebounded to previous levels: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/consumer-spending

Manufacturing output has also completely rebounded: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS

Unemployment has fallen back to 6%, near prepandemic levels https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate

And the technology sector never really slowed down. Many tech companies experienced high growth during 2020.

Because the stock market is not the economy. Much of the gain in the s&p 500 has been from companies that benefitted from the quarantines—Apple, Amazon, etc.

There’s no appetite for global war and China is about to become the largest economy. Most of the world is entering the consumer space via technology. There’s a lot of people, and we’ve identified what everyone worldwide wants to buy (electric cars, gadgets, games, movies, food). Every market is just going to get huge, so I really don’t see what the argument is for ‘main street’ to be struggling.

The major concern is during this boom the robber barons will take an uncharitable share of the wealth and accumulate it at the top, but the overall global economy is more than signaling it’s going to bust out even more.

the nyts offered a good explanation for this in january [1]. the general idea is that white collar workers’ usual discretionary spending was diverted into the stock market.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/01/upshot/why-markets-boomed...

Is the economy struggling? Everything is seeing unprecedented consumer demand: from housing to bicycles to video games, demand is outstripping supply.

income inequality in action.