Of course it sounds fallacious--you've constructed a straw man out of my original argument.
There's nothing circular about the concept of debt. It's a fundamental aspect of how our economy works. The way debt is raised is through markets. Again, this is not a controversial or political statement.
Of course workers built the roads. And they were paid to build those roads by debt raised via bond markets. Governments and organizations use debt to bring the future into the present and amortize large investments over long periods of time. The liquidity and demand for this debt in the global markets allows them to do this.
No marketplace for debt = no way to reliably execute big infrastructure projects for all but the richest of countries. The market (the demand for debt) is literally the enabler.
Nothing I've said here is a mischaracterization of reality.
> It's a pretty shitty indicator, I'd say.
Again, I'm not advocating that short term financial market gyrations have any explanatory power for the future. I'm simply explaining why journalists use it: because it's easy.
See, this kind of thing really gets to me. Here's you circa 1290: "If you live in a fiefdom with wells, irrigation, castles, etc. -- then your Lord is responsible for everything around you." See how fallacious that sounds when you transpose it this way?
The central issue is that you're justifying a thing from the context of the thing itself. You're explaining modern capitalism from the framework of modern capitalism. It's circular, and you get ridiculous things like "the markets built the roads". Ahm, no, workers built the roads!
>Are the markets all-knowing or perfectly efficient? Of course not. But it's literally the only place where you can measure how a global herd of humans are feeling about the state of the world at any given time with a single number.
They are a weighted way of seeing how some humans are feeling about things. A number that gives as much weight to 8 guys as it does to 3.7 billion. It's a pretty shitty indicator, I'd say.