Why are stocks soaring

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Get help. Privacy Policy. Password recovery. Home Economy Stock markets are soaring but so is grief — Indian traders grapple Survey finds we are back to concerns of As long as the Fed keeps buying bonds hand over fist, depressing bond yields and flooding markets in liquidity, equities will defy the economic downturn.

Indeed, who knows what will follow? In the past, investors stretching for yield have piled into all sorts of alternative assets, from emerging market debt and equities to mortgage-backed bonds.

Today, bets such as these seem outlandish, given the enormous risks. But give the markets time. In , the radical economist Robert Rowthorn argued that inflation could be thought of as the price governments paid for social peace. That decade, oil shocks, political unrest, and the end of the Bretton Woods monetary system imposed a high price for social peace, in the form of persistent inflation. Social peace was cheap. A world with guaranteed income for capital and unprecedented unemployment for labor tells us about the relative power of each.

Since , central bank policies have produced inflation again—but only in asset prices—while workers have endured a lost decade of unemployment and stagnant wages. Never before this spring have so many people lost their jobs so quickly, and never before have central banks stepped in to provide so much liquidity to financial markets with no obvious limit. A world with guaranteed income for capital and unprecedented unemployment for labor tells us about the relative power of each: It has become very expensive to buy social peace from capital, while labor can be offered next to nothing.

That contradiction has lasted for a decade and intensified this year. That is what the surge in asset prices is telling us. But it cannot last forever. The pandemic will change the economic and financial order forever. We asked nine leading global thinkers for their predictions. The pandemic is transforming urban life. We asked 12 leading global experts in urban planning, policy, history, and health for their predictions.

The pandemic will change the world forever. We asked 12 leading global thinkers for their predictions. Shusha was the key to the recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Now Baku wants to turn the fabled fortress town into a resort. Wall Street and Main Street are on two different planets.

We asked six leading experts why. Analysis Joseph E. Stiglitz , Robert J. Shiller , Gita Gopinath , Carmen M. Investment pros said that despite the sticker shock Americans might feel at the gas pump or the supermarket meat counter, the combination of rising wages, an elevated savings rate and lower revolving debt levels has buffered the most painful impacts of rising prices.

Individual balance sheets aren't in bad shape, nor are corporate balance sheets in really bad shape. And the tight labor market has been driving wages higher, especially at the lower end of the income spectrum.

Bank Wealth Management. As a result, corporate earnings have largely held up, some even to a greater degree than expected — and markets love an upside surprise. Margins really haven't been impacted to the degree many people were expecting, with wage increases and costs of goods increasing," said Dustin Thackeray, a partner and the chief investment officer at Crewe Advisors.

Companies have been able to keep their profits up by passing cost increases along to customers. The question is to what extent they can continue to raise prices without seeing sales drop.

Haworth said: "They really believe they have pricing power at this point. They're able to raise prices without damaging their unit sales growth. If we did see consumer spending falter The trajectory of the coronavirus pandemic also remains a wild card.

Experts say the coronavirus, although it is better controlled now compared to a year ago, could yet throw a wrench into the economy — precisely because it is no longer front and center.

Martha C.