It’s past time to refocus our national attention from the fortunes of the 500 to the concerns of countless families living paycheck to paycheck. But the truth is, Jim Cramer’s antics on Mad Money are at best irrelevant and at worst insulting to the millions of Americans who don’t have the money to spend on theatrical stock picks, and don’t have the time to watch a show that airs on their way home from work. Share prices scroll endlessly on the nightly news, while analysts devote entire shows to evaluating stocks as though they were NBA draft prospects. The media-its members perhaps over-indexing on their own status in the stockholding elite-has perpetuated this fallacy. On the flip side, when the pandemic shuttered businesses and sent unemployment skyrocketing, the S&P 500 saw its best month of trading in 33 years.Īnd yet, thanks to the tenor of today’s stock market coverage, consumers still tend to conflate the market with the economy overall.

After a judge blocked Spirit Airlines’ merger with JetBlue, the carrier’s shares dropped 20 percent. The same goes for antitrust measures that keep prices competitive and hold companies accountable to consumers. Wins for labor, like unionization and wage growth, often sink stock values. A “bull” market, indeed.Īdding insult to injury, the value of the stock market sometimes reflects the exact inverse of the worker’s experience. And to echo a senator from Vermont, the wealthiest 1 percent now own more than half of all US stocks-a fact that both illustrates and perpetuates the gross wealth disparity in this country. White Americans own a staggering 89 percent of stocks. Americans with postgraduate degrees are twice as likely to hold stocks as high school grads. And even for those with direct stockholdings, the average value of their investments is around $15,000-for comparison, the average American owes about $60,000 in debt. Among those households who do, most have only indirect investments through index funds and 401(k)s, which amount to a tiny slice of the total pie. Nearly 40 percent of Americans have no financial stake in the stock market. For the average working American, the market’s ups and downs have little or no correlation to their lives-but they think it does, thanks in no small part to close and continuous media coverage. In other words: The companies that were already making a lot of money are now making even more. It’s the name coined by Bank of America analyst Michael Hartnett to label the seven tech companies-Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla-that make up over a quarter of the stock market’s total value, and that added a collective $5.1 trillion to the market last year. No, that’s not the title of a new remake of a remake of a Spaghetti Western film.

The S&P 500 rose to new heights last week on the strength of the Magnificent Seven. Arild Vågen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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