Stock Market Affected By...
Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2012 Mar 09, 2012 - 09:37 AM GMTBy: Submissions
Mark Blair writes: The stock market is affected, short-, mid-, and long-term, by The Things That People Do. Sometimes those things are riots and revolutions. My thesis is that, as things go from bad to worse, people will indulge themselves in these pastimes, and that will impact negatively on the markets.
Take a stroll with me down the main street of my home town, Albany, Western Australia. There isn’t a single stand-alone butcher or fruit shop. There are the Major Supermarkets, a health-food shop, and a number of other basic services; but a solid majority of the businesses are discretionary: restaurants, cafes, galleries, shoe and clothing boutiques, a foot-massage salon etc. etc. My favourite is an eco-friendly dreadlocks salon.
The nature of Main Street reflects our social values, our ‘social practice.’ We have ‘lifted off’ from any solid base of social practice in which the members of a coherent culture produce things, complete things, well-made and practical things, things that are for local or fairly local consumption.
Now reflect on the social practice of the American working class during the Great Depression. Families lived for years in hessian Hoovervilles. They had few expectations of pensions, health care, transport, education. They considered that life was just some stuff – usually not great stuff – that happened to you, and you put up with it.
Two things will happen in conjunction as things get worse:
the first is that we won’t experience a sort of ‘settling’ of the economy, a simple reduction in its size while a solid-though-reduced foundation of it remains strong enough to maintain social cohesion. Rather, we’ll find out that our economy is too lopsided and abstract to really function, that it has no ‘butcher, baker, candlestick maker foundation.’ Those, for example, who have researched peak oil comprehend how fragile our economy will be revealed to be when cheap oil is no longer readily available to ship from continent to continent the components of the products that we buy as we drive from place to place.
the second thing is that people won’t respond to this socio-economic dysfunction by resigning themselves to a decade or two of eating fried dough while living in the cardboard box their plasma television originally came in. We can expect unprecedented social upheaval, and it will impact negatively on the markets.
Mark Blair has been studying political theory for twenty-five years. He owns no stocks at all. His brand-new Website is at post-eknoid.com.au
© 2012 Copyright Mark Blair - All Rights Reserved
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