Despite a global pandemic and double-digit unemployment in the United States, the S&P 500 stock index reached a new high yesterday. We asked Andrew Ross Sorkin, a business columnist and founder of The Times’s DealBook newsletter, to help us understand how the market could be doing so well amid economic devastation. As irrational as it might seem, here’s the way investors rationalize the bullish stock market to themselves (we’ll only find out whether they are right or wrong in the future):1. The stock market is forward-looking: Investors are betting on what the world and the economy look like in 12 to 18 months from now, not what they look like today, tomorrow or this fall. And retailers like Walmart and Home Depot are growing in part because small businesses have closed, allowing the bigger companies to take even more market share.

Source: New York Times August 19, 2020 10:30 UTC