The stock market is, plainly, no longer simply a concern of the elite. “We like to joke that the markets are not the economy,” Peter Atwater of Financial Insyghts recently told Bloomberg, “but we’ve reached a point now where the economy is the markets.”
In past articles, I’ve covered the rise and risks of retail investing for everyday Americans. To recap: a majority of Americans now own stocks; young women are the fastest growing demographic of investors; and the onset of “commission free” trading has lured millions of us into high-risk trading in speculative stocks and the derivatives market. All of this has taken place under the guise of words like access, equality, and democratization.
Yet recent weeks has seen a spread of predictions of a bubble — and cracks beginning to show in the consumer economy as well as private credit. Faced with all this, there’s perhaps three compelling narratives that can tell us something about what’s happening on the stock market today.
The first such narrative looks at the late David Graeber’s 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. In it, he argued that capitalism solved a former wave of automation by conjuring up a class of white-collar workers who don’t do anything useful.
The theory caught fire — and workers came forward in droves confessing that they, too, are not exactly sure why they are needed. White-collar professionals were overseeing teams, drafting new PowerPoint decks, and peddling through emails, but few felt like their work was essential to the production process.
Now, we find ourselves in the worst job market since the turn of the century, rivaled only by the immediate crisis of 2009. This October saw the mass firing of middle managers and office workers at a handful of tectonic companies like Amazon, UPS, Target, and General Motors. The stocks of each company jumped upon layoff announcements. It turns out that Wall Street doesn’t believe these corporate workers are adding value to…
Auteur: Clark Randall
