The Coronavirus Matters. The Stock Market Doesn’t.
With the arrival of a novel coronavirus, our obsession with the stock market may literally kill us.
theintercept.com
Yesterday CNBC's Rick Santelli went further, staking out the position that stocks losing value is actually more terrifying than millions of deaths. "Maybe we'd be just better off if we gave it to everybody," Santelli sagely explained. That way, lots of people would expire quickly, thereby removing the uncertainty that's been plaguing investors.
It's easy to criticize Santelli, but he was just taking the logic of America's obsession with the stock market a few steps further than normal. For decades, whenever we've faced a choice between the reality of human beings and little numbers on a screen, we've always gone with the little numbers.
Yet the stock market has little direct relevance for regular people. By some estimates, the richest 10 percent of U.S. households account for over 80 percent of American stock ownership. The richest 1 percent by themselves own half of that, or 40 percent of stock. Half of Americans own no stock at all.
Once you understand this, the media's stock market mania is maddeningly hilarious.
The problem with the stock market is not it going up, down, or sideways. It's what our obsession with it has done to us. It's that paying attention to capitalism has made us think like capitalists. It exerts a gravitational-like pull on our psyches, nudging us psychologically to the right and shredding our instincts for social solidarity.
First, there's basic class conflict. Once you own even a modest amount of stock, you'll likely find yourself ambivalent about companies squeezing as much money as possible out of their employees, even if you're one of them. Rather than thinking about how to work with everyone else to stop the Fortune 500 from ravaging America, you're hoping to get your teeny-tiny personal share from the ravages.
"A lot of middle and upper middle-income people identify with the stock market's fate," says Henwood. "Instead of seeing it as their class enemy, they see it as their friend."
But a true friend would not incentivize you to profit from climate collapse.
I recommend reading the whole article, as I left out most of it.Likewise, scientists have been warning for decades about exactly this kind of infectious disease. One of their suggestions was for the U.S. government to help pay to improve the public health infrastructure in poorer countries. We may all quite soon regret not doing this, even if it would have required making Amazon pay a tax rate greater than 1.2 percent and hence denting their stock price.
And if we'd been less transfixed by what corporations were doing, we could have realized what they can't do. In the imaginary world of economic textbooks, a huge pharmaceutical company would have poured tens of billions into developing the capacity to more quickly perfect and manufacture vaccines in huge volumes, so that the omniscient stock market would reward them for their prescience. Here on Earth, the stock market would have punished any company that took such a big risk with an uncertain payoff. Yet we couldn't see that the only way to better prepare for the new coronavirus would have been with much greater government action.
Will COVID-19 pop another economic bubble?
