Zachary Karabell - Zachary Karabell was educated at Columbia, Oxford, and Harvard and is the author of several books. The World Economic Forum designated him a Global Leader for Tomorrow.
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Last week, I wrote a column in Time about the unfortunate tendency of investors, pundits, economists et al to view stock markets as barometers for the economy and economic data as indicators of the markets. This tendency is pronounced in the media in general and the financial media above all, which looks daily for a story about why markets move up or down.
Almost everyday, some sort of economic statistic is released by government, ours or some government somewhere. Whether that is GDP data (which was released today and showed a not-too-impressive 2.4% growth for the second quarter) or inflation or durable goods or consumer confidence (not a government statistics but one that gets a lot of attention), each day brings the release of some economic figure. That permits a daily narrative that links the release of the statistic to the movement of the markets.
As if to prove that point, an article appeared in the New York Times on July 28, with the following headline: "Shares Fall as Data Says The Economy is Weakening." The piece actually came from Bloomberg news, but no matter. It was yet another example of the false correlation between markets and economies.
Stocks represent ownership stakes - tiny ones - of companies, and companies increasingly exist in a universe only marginally related to any one national economy. They can, in fact, avoid many of the things that drag down national economies - labor, health care, taxes, old people, young people. And they can take advantage of things like cheap and plentiful global capital, easy mobility of goods, and increasingly helpful information technology systems that allow them to increase efficiency and productivity. They exist in their own transnational economic system, and the value of their stocks has little to do with whether the U.S. economy or any economy is ailing.
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