Michael Hudson Short : The stock market says everything’s OK

Yves Smith’s column in today’s NC has a wonderful summary explanation of why hasn’t the stock market plunged on the news from the US/Iran war:

Decades of momentum trading being far more lucrative than fundamental analysis, exacerbated by faith in the Greenspan-Bernanke-Yellen-Powell put, plus indoctrination that if you hold financial assets long enough, they will work out in the end, seems to have produced cognitive stupor, an inability to recognize the black swan that just landed on your desk.

But it goes even deeper. In the early 1980s, in a short print article I have never been able to locate again, management guru Peter Drucker noticed that the symbol economy, as in profiting from finance and other non-material products, was assuming primacy over the real economy. He could sense this would produce bad outcomes in the long run but could not articulate why.

Now the world is run almost entirely by professional-managerial class symbol manipulators, who like Ursula von der Leyen, think if they can make things work on paper or in a PowerPoint and get approving nods at meetings, their schemes are viable. Admittedly, current divisions over what to do about Iran shows that at least some EU leaders have sobered up, per a new Politico story, EU leaders find themselves incapable of action despite wars so close to home.

Old Tunes coming to my mind: