Ask HN: Why is the stock market up 30%+ from pre-Covid levels?

>There's nowhere to put your money that's safe.

Sure there is; physical assets. Doesn't matter what happens to the market, people still need (for example) houses.

In general, Hacker News has an atrocious understanding of finance. You see some absolutely swivel-eyed nonsense being given the time of day here by people who should really know better.

I'd recommend looking for a few "What's the economic outlook?" articles somewhere like the Financial Times for a more reasonable and better qualified view. I think the FT Alphaville blog is still free to read once you register. That's generally good.

Nevertheless I will go ahead and answer the question with no sense of shame or irony.

> Does anyone have any explanation as to why asset prices are up so much across the board apart from fed easy money policy?

You mentioned a huge part of it already. Another big part is the spillover effect of the monetary policy of every other major central bank in the world. It means governments can borrow extremely cheaply to prop up businesses and provide extra social protection to their citizens, without the spectre of brutal austerity budgets in the next couple of years.

The flipside of this protection is that bond yields are on the floor (and yes, the recent uptick from "on the floor" is still basically "on the floor"), so a lot of the money that needs a home ends up in the stock market, pushing up prices. This is kind of by design, for better or for worse. A lot of money ends up in property too, which is arguably why housing crises are getting more and more common around the world.

In the USA there's also anticipation of Joe Biden's stimulus plan, which is really very big indeed. It's argued (gently, by only some economists) that it will boost consumer demand in many areas that don't need any extra boosting. Some of this anticipation is manifesting itself in stock prices.

> Is there any way this could end well?

Depends what you mean by "end well", but basically yes, I think so. It's not likely to be a rerun of 1929 or 2008, for Keynesian contra-cyclical spending reasons that I'm not qualified to get into. There could well be a correction/mean-reversion/crash, but that's true of any time period. There might be a kind of Japanese-style slow/no growth eventually. There might be a major war or a natural disaster that upends everything again. It's hard to know.

I would also say that your "indefinitely" timeframe of 3 to 5 years is way too short. Especially for investing as opposed to day-trading, you need to be able to take the rough with the smooth over many years. If the stock market risk seems too high at the moment, just put your money in cash and eat the negligible or mildly negative real returns.

A lot of people had started investing because they don't know what to do with the money. When you stop spending money on restaurants or vacation or other stuff which is no longer available, you end up surplus. So why not invest it in the stock market?

Higher rates come w/ a lot of political pain. You saw the prior administration talking about keeping rates low and tying that to low cost of borrowing for the US. It means higher mortgage rates for homebuyers as well.

The Fed has spoken about keeping rates zero until 2023 [0]. Unemployment came down considerably (~6%). Last time it was this level was mid-2014. We started raising rates at ~5% unemployment in early-2016. I think theres a good chance you'll hit 5% unemployment well before 2023, especially considering that the economy isn't fully open yet and we're still vaccinating.

I don't see the political will to raise rates and slow this thing down.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/09/16/fede...

This is my reasoning - there's political instability at the moment, and I'd like the option to change countries as necessary. Stable countries like the US have violent riots, less stable ones are facing coups and spiraling debt.