THE MARKET

by Bob Walsh

In mid-February the stock market hit an all-time high of about 29,500. Five weeks later it had dropped to 18,500. That is somewhat more than 1/3 of its value in a very short period of time.

As of yesterday, not quite three weeks after its precipitous bottoming, the market has regained half of what it lost in the five previous weeks. It is back up to a tad over 23,700. News about the oil industry was very helpful.

Obviously it would have been better if the market had not dropped like a pole-axed steer. Obviously it would have been better if we had not had to shut down the economy to cope with Covid-19 (which maybe we actually didn't, but we thought we did and we in fact did so).

I suppose the real test will come when the country is reopened for business (in four to six weeks if we are lucky) and we find out how many small and medium-size business will have been killed off permanently. Restaurant industry talking heads are saying the restaurant business will be devastated. We will also get solid numbers on the bug deaths, and the bill for what we did to fight it, which will now clearly be north of $2 trillion.

If nothing else we will have learned some very valuable lessons, at too high a cost.