So big tech stocks — and the people who own them — are riding high because investors believe that they’ll do very well in the long run. The depressed economy hardly matters.
Unfortunately, ordinary Americans get very little of their income from capital gains, and can’t live on rosy projections about their future prospects. Telling your landlord not to worry about your current inability to pay rent, because you’ll surely have a great job five years from now, will get you nowhere — or, more accurately, will get you kicked out of your apartment and put on the street.
From the comments:
Mickey NY Aug. 20 Times Pick
It’s sad really, this free market worship. No investment in post secondary education affordability in the rust belt, no investment in infrastructure during the often bragged about this period of Wall Street record setting, no bipartisan long-term game plan for preparing and training citizens of this nation for 21st century skills. And the environment seems to go the opposite of record Wall Street numbers. Red states need to look in the mirror and ask themselves about how giving tax cuts to billionaires and building 3 miles of walls is working out.
Paul Krugman commented August 21
@Mickey
Prediction: almost nobody will look in the mirror. A sad reality I’ve learned over the years is that almost nobody ever admits having been wrong about anything.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/20/opinion/stock-market-unemployment.html