The Thing About Wall Street

It is in the nature of the stock markets to go up.

I'm not a full-on economic expert, I barely got out of college Econ 1101 with a C plus, but ny dad worked awhile as a broker and still invests to this day, so I have a small inkling of how it all works.

For starters, "Buy low and sell high."

/rimshot

Seriously, my observation about stock markets comes from even a cursory glance of any market chart. The Dow Jones, the one on Wall Street, the one most news services keeps an eye on, shows a near constant, relatively slow uphill climb going from left (past years) to right (current year).

From the Business Insider Markets site, tracking from 2010 to 2020

For what I know, it's a combination of factors.

The constant addition of startup companies and IPOs (Initial Public Offerings) as companies add themselves to the list, that a certain amount of investment gets pumping into the markets right there. The market goes up because the market is adding more publicly traded companies, that simple.

The ever-changing and growing industries, such as the entire Information Technology industry that overwhelmed the markets in the 1990s, expands the number of companies out there, creating a diverse investment field to build a portfolio that won't fall apart if just one industry has a bad year or overall downturn. A smart investor can use the minuses to balance out the pluses and keep boosting the values of the pluses.

Upon all that, a major shift of upper incomes directly using the capital gains on investments as their own income, increasingly separate from the original purpose - well, one of them - of the markets as a means to invest in capital and business growth. All a rich person has to do is put enough money into stocks, let the corporations boost their values through buybacks, and let those markets keep generating more money that quite honestly never existed before and isn't based on anything other than the hopes and predictions of the markets themselves.

It's all a wonderful illusion, when you look at it that way.

And it's an illusion that despite all the wealth and power that's tied into it, the stock markets are vulnerable to outside forces that can turn a steady uphill chart into a cliff of eternal peril.

That chart above is from the past ten years of the market from 2010 to 2020. Here's a chart from the past month:

Also from Business Insider Markets site, tracking from February to March

We've been witness to one of the greatest collapses in stock market history, not so much from trump's meddling with tariffs since 2018 that began the wobbly status the Dow is in now. Despite all of trump's worst efforts, the markets kept rebounding once they figured how to adjust to the Orange One's conniptions against China, Europe, and other trading markets.

No, this collapse is from the now-unavoidable Coronavirus pandemic, something that's been out there since December 2019 and something that trump's administration has been mishandling - through avoidance, lying, blame-shifting, and nonexistent planning - the government's response to a flu outbreak that is already disrupting every aspect of human life. Above all, trump's failure to prepare for trade to break down, medical supplies to dry up or run out, businesses to close due to declining patronage, people losing jobs as workplaces close, all of that.

The markets have been in shock since February, when it was clear the federal government wasn't prepared to handle the long-term implications of the pandemic. We've borne witness to some of the worst drops in the Dow Jones since 1987 (Black Monday) and 1929 (the first Big One)... almost all of them in the past ten days.

When trump took an Oath of Office he wasn't prepared to run back in January 2017, the Dow Jones was around 19,488 points, give or take an 8. As of tonight, it's at 20,188, to where we're one more bad trading away of watching every stock market gain made between 2017 to 2019 - where it reached the highs of 29,000 points - completely wiped out. For a man who brags about how the stock markets were doing thanks to the Republicans Tax Cut of 2017 - which turned into a sugar/cocaine/meth/steroid boost of greedy proportions - finding himself back to Obama levels (or falling even further) has to be a blow to that narcissistic Id of his.

And while the Futures are pointing to an up day tomorrow - because investors will try to buy stocks in companies while their values are lower, and they are desperate to make the markets go back up again - there's every sign the markets will keep dropping another day later because nearly every action trump's White House has done up to now hasn't helped. Every spike on that last month's chart was followed by more drops.

And things are poised to get worse.

What's happening to Wall Street right now hurts a bit, especially for people who ARE investing towards things like retirement and a modicum of personal fiscal stability. But this is just a sideshow to the rest of the world coping with a global pandemic.

The worst things are going to be happening to our families and those most vulnerable to the COVID19 virus (our kids and our grandparents), the worst things are going to be happening to our hospitals and medical workers and our emergency responders. The worst things are going to be happening to those forced to keep working in public, exposed to vectors, trying to keep the power on and the water running and the toilet paper shelves at the stores restocked.

This stuff with Wall Street is just one sign of how bad it's been and how bad it's going.

I don't want to show the charts of the infected and the dying. THAT'S too horrible to review...