I think we’ve known for a while that the stock market is not the economy. My two cents: 1) Uncertainty is anathema to markets. At the beginning of the crisis,

I think we’ve known for a while that the stock market is not the economy. My two cents: 1) Uncertainty is anathema to markets. At the beginning of the crisis, there was a ton of uncertainty about how the disease would progress, what it’s impact on supply chains would be globally, and how governments would respond. In the last few weeks, the US has gotten a lot more information on how things progress, “flatten the curve strategies” are appearing to work (which reduces uncertainty), supply chains are still very strong and, for staple goods/services, only minority affected, and the central banks of the world are issuing a MASSIVE amount of short term liquidity to prevent credit crunches. 2) (this is a bit more cynical). I suspect the productivity of a huge number of Americans, particularly in service roles, has disproportionately less impact on the economic productivity of publicly traded companies. In other words, many jobs are disposable without impacting the financial health of companies in the stock market. Small businesses are being gutted, and so is a lot of big retail, but it’s been too short of a time for those effects to make a dent in how many of the publicly traded businesses are operating.