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Re:We Just Witnessed the Fastest Stock Market Correction on ... by AnimalMuppet on Friday February 28, 2020 @12:13AM (#22440671)
Has the US' public capital dropped 10%? No. But prices are the discounted expectations of future profits, and future profits are suddenly less than we expect them to be.

But it could be worse than that. How long did it take the economy to recover from the Black Death? At least 100 years. If too many people die, then yes, the public capital has actually been significantly damaged.

Re:We Just Witnessed the Fastest Stock Market Correction on ... by asdfasgasdgasdg on Friday February 28, 2020 @12:36AM (#22440756)
Ok, so I guess it makes sense that the price would drop a lot since near term profits should be weighted more heavily than long term. 10% still seems like a lot with exponential discounting unless this is going to hit a lot harder and longer than I expect.
Re:We Just Witnessed the Fastest Stock Market Correction on ... by AnimalMuppet on Friday February 28, 2020 @11:32AM (#22443938)
Well... What I said is kind of the ideal world. The reasonable value of the stock is the time-discounted expectation of future profits. The actual value is heavily influenced by what each person thinks everyone else thinks. So for the price to drop, people don't have to think it will affect future profits at all. They just have to think that other people will think that the price should drop.