Someone on Twitter described the stock market as a graph of rich people feelings and, facetious as that is, I wonder if there's truth to it. A market driven partly by emotion could mean a stock hysteresis where the market's long-term reaction lags behind the economic reality like you describe. The recent headline "16 million people just got laid off but U.S. stocks had their best week in 45 years" is the most mind-shatteringly insane headline I've ever seen.
The other thing to remember is that nobody actually loses anything when stock prices go down. Everyone still owns the same stocks, in the aggregate, and no actual material property is lost. Just the valuation changes. To insist that valuations cannot be allowed to go down as a matter of government policy is totally bonkers.
> Everyone still owns the same stocks, in the aggregate, and no actual material property is lost. Just the valuation changes.
But the valuation is the number that actually matters, not the number of stocks you own. You can't buy food with stocks, you have to exchange them for money first. If the price of stocks goes down then you own less real value.
Right but just as the total number of outstanding stocks remains the same, so does the total number of outstanding dollars. Both the total stocks and the total dollars remain unchanged, they just changed hands. For every loser of money, there is also a winner. Just because you paid too much does not mean that the federal government should come running to bail you out. In the aggregate, nothing is created or destroyed except for illusions.
