“You may not hear a lot about promoting vaccines over the airwaves in August and September, but you’ll be overwhelmed by it come November,” an official from Operation Warp Speed — the Trump administration’s effort to accelerate vaccine development — told reporters last week.
The Fed can and will goose stonks whenever they need a little help, and once the stonks are goosed “no one” in charge cares anymore.
The glaring disconnect between the real economy, of working humans with jobs and bills to pay, and the investor class economy, embodied by the stock market, is one of the most brutal and devious political issues of this age of crisis in which we’re living. Though free marketeers like to boast of the fact that more than half of Americans now own stocks, the fact is that most of them own too few stocks to matter to their day-to-day economic lives. Half of all stocks in America are owned by the wealthiest 1% of people. They are the stock market’s target audience and prime movers. The primary effect of high stock prices today is to insulate the rich from the consequences of the wrecked real economy. So long as stocks are doing okay, there is no need for the class of people who control most of America’s institutions to feel much urgency to save the lives of everyone. A strong stock market is like a sturdy wall around the rich and powerful. You can stay outside and lose your job and starve and die, and it won’t penetrate their serene bubble very much at all.
This is the kind of analogy that could only happen at the intersection between sports-fanaticism-taken-to-logical-conclusion and political-party-as-death-cult:
Under 1 million new jobless claims! Yay! We live in a world where a number that would have been shocking prior to Covid is actually kinda-sorta good news.
