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‘Living With It’: Record Stocks, Record COVID
It's an odd pairing. Record high equities and record high COVID cases, I mean.
That's not to say we haven't seen something like it before. US stocks have, after all, notched the second most all-time highs for any calendar year on record in 2021, a year which also brought us the Delta variant and all the associated death and suffering. (Remember India's bout with Delta? It was a truly macabre affair.)
For the better part of the pandemic era, though, we've been conditioned to associate the ebb a
So we are “looking past” Covid, maintaining the myth that equities are a forward discounting mechanism. But I’ve been having difficulty seeing what will support consumer spending and earnings (not that they matter) in 2022.
In line with the piece about Goldman’s forecast our Good Doctor just penned, both fiscal and monetary support is being withdrawn. I was just reading a piece on Paypal where the author quoted the company: “on November 9, 2021, PayPal Holdings admitted that “there has unquestionably been a pull forward in e-commerce” and “stimulus did have an impact.”
I also wonder how much of the oft-cited wage increases are being offset by rises in consumer prices.
How much more does the average consumer have to spend once the post-Covid world finally arrives?