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Why is the stock market rallying when the economy is so bad?

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Re: Why is the stock market rallying when the economy is so bad?

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like there is a decade of guillotines in the future that they are either not seeing or are looking way past. But then I've always been cynical about the growing divide between the uber-wealthy and the other 99% of this country.

Guillotines might have worked well in the past, but with modern weapons and technology, you can use a much smaller portion of the population to suppress a much larger portion of the population. You can pay 10% of the population well enough that they support the top 0.01%, and the top 10% can pay the next 20% to 30% well enough or provide a sufficient probability to move up (or illusion) that they are incentivized to…

Uh, you can't just pay massive numbers of the population without the wealth creation in the first place. We do not have some centralized salary authority that pays people based on loyalty to some arbitrary payment distribution scheme. This is completely contrived.

Re: Why is the stock market rallying when the economy is so bad?

#242

Because a company’s stock price is in theory what the market expects is the sum of the total future discounted cash flows that unit of “equity” generates. [1] This means that fundamentally, stocks are forward looking several decades and beyond. The economy right now might be bad but if the expectation is that there is a slow and long recovery lasting 2 years, if a company is expected to be operational, profitable and…

Exactly. Here's a very intuitive way to think about it. Disney World's revenue has currently fallen by 100% this period. How much do you think the fair market value of Disney World should decline by? Clearly the answer is much less than 100%. Even if Disney World stays closed for two years, it's clearly a very valuable asset. As an asset it probably has a 50 year effective life, so 2 years of closing represents no mo…

This makes a lot of sense but then shouldn't this apply to stocks like Netflix or Peloton. That once the people get back to work and gyms, these companies will struggle to grow as fast and in a way face permanent damage till the next pandemic?

Re: Why is the stock market rallying when the economy is so bad?

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if there is a second wave, there will be a time after Corona eventually. There won't be any new players by then so the market shares will almost be unchanged. Stock prices are discounted future profits for about 15 to 20 years. Those profits are still there when Corona is over. From that perspective, why should share prices fall by more than 5-10% for every year that Corona is locking down the economy? *edit: If…

From that perspective, the stock market should have no volatility in share prices whatsoever - it should fairly value each company based on their profits over the next 15 to 20 years, and since those profits don't change, neither should the share price. Stocks are based on expectations of future profits, i.e. psychology. "In the long run, the stock market is a weighing machine. In the short run, it's a voting machine…

> stock market should have no volatility in share prices whatsoever - it should fairly value each company based on their profits over the next 15 to 20 years

Computing this depends on estimating/forecasting/extrapolating/guessing a lot of values. E.g. what kind of revenue growth the company will have. How the structure of company expenses may change. Parameters like a discount rate make a huge difference in the estimated value. In many cases the majority of the value for a discounted cash flow valuation of a stock comes from the tail term where you give up trying to unroll the contribution for each year and make a simpler approximation of what the company will be doing 20 years+ in the future.

The computed share value has a lot of sensitivity to adjusting some of these inputs, and in many cases it is not at all obvious what values parameters should be set to.

Re: Why is the stock market rallying when the economy is so bad?

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I'm sure plenty of Theranos / WeWork style opportunities will emerge to pick up the slack. It's a fundamental problem of capitalism: the market's notion of "value" is weighted by wealth, without growth to stir things up wealth concentrates, and those looking to create value are increasingly forced to search for marginal "rich people problems" rather than tackle obvious "poor people problems." You wind up in a pa…

Exactly, you get rich by doing what the rich want, not what most people want, that’s why Lamborghini owns Volkswagen! Wait..

"If you want to dine with the classes, you've got to sell to the masses."

Re: Why is the stock market rallying when the economy is so bad?

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are still waiting for the surge of inflation you inflation hawks complained about in 2008 when this was all last done... https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl...

He did specifically say asset bubble. And look at how much the stock market has grown since 2008. It has outpaced CPI by a huge margin.

There was an asset bubble in property, and you can argue that there still is (there is in my city). However, wages aren't going up, as someone else below pointed out. Inflation to some degree is a race between income and spending power, right? If incomes stay stagnant but house prices double in cost, that's downward pressure on that asset.

The stock market is a different beast. Is it accurate to call it inflation if the asset inflation is "going there"?

Both health care costs and education costs - both mentioned as evidence of inflation someplace and two more places where excess inflation to be "going there" - have been making headlines before this crisis, and I bet they'll become even more prominent after the crisis ends. There will be downward pressure on prices politically on those two things, is my prediction.

Re: Why is the stock market rallying when the economy is so bad?

#246

This quote from Jeffrey Sachs might offer some context: “Look, I meet a lot of those people on Wall Street on a regular basis right now... I know them. These are the people I have lunch with. And I am going to put it very bluntly: I regard the moral environment as pathological. [these people] have no responsibility to pay taxes; they have no responsibility to their clients; they have no responsibility to counter part…

There's this Wall Street movie made in 1970 (?) about this very kind of people.

Re: Why is the stock market rallying when the economy is so bad?

#247

Because the stock market doesn't represent the economy as most people experience the economy. First, a lot of companies don't pay out dividends or buy back stock these days, so as time passes, removing their stock price from the price at IPO, their stock price becomes based on perception--not even perception of the reality of the company's value, but perception of the stock's value, which is increasingly just specula…

It is really not a mystery why the market has done so well and will continue to do well. Corporate profits, especially in the tech sector, are at near record highs, much higher than during the 90s. Companies like Walmart are printing cash, and that money goes into buybacks, dividends ,or shareholder equity. Either way, shareholders benefit and this is magnified by very low inflation, so the real return is even higher…

Corporate earnings have been flat for over a year, so they don't really explain why the S&P 500 still went up 15% from the 2018 highs. And now expectations are down substantially and even for 2021 are below 2018 levels.

Re: Why is the stock market rallying when the economy is so bad?

#248

> And as has often been the case in recent years, investors find themselves faced with few attractive alternatives if they opt out of betting on stocks. The problem is so familiar it has its own acronym: TINA, or There Is No Alternative to stocks. Cash: Gets eaten away by inflation. Although the CPI doesn't indicate high inflation it only measures consumer goods. Inflation is there in the price of investments. If you…

So what would you say are liquid, relatively low risk alternatives to holding cash? Worth diversifying into other currencies?

No, every other currency is going to inflate faster than the dollar. Gold is a good hedge, whether physical or ETF or gold mining stocks.

Re: Why is the stock market rallying when the economy is so bad?

#249
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not at all the situation. Reality is the 1% (wealth) making the 10% (income) pay for the 90% (both) to support their investments with consumption and debt.

Trickle down economics doesn’t work. If it did then wages would have increased in the past 40 years, but they’ve remained stagnant while the rich get richer and cost of living skyrockets. But if you prefer to lick the boots of our plutocratic overlords, feel free

But...wages have increased over the past 40 years...and at a greater rate than in Europe/Aus/other developed.

Re: Why is the stock market rallying when the economy is so bad?

#250

I work at a big tech company. One of the big realizations we've made is that WFH is not killing our productivity - it may actually be increasing it. If that is widely true, it has huge implications, and points towards an enormous amount of value that can be unlocked, by allowing professionals to work wherever they want (presumably in lower CoL locales). This article indicates that the housing crisis costs the US econ…

Congrats on your realization, the world begs to differ.
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