Aftermath: Wall Street Is Lying to Itself [View all]
https://prospect.org/2026/04/23/aftermath-iran-trump-wall-street-is-lying-to-itself/
The real economic numbers have been bad since Drumpf took office. And Wall Street continues to ignore them.
The evidence that investors are overlooking the implications of the current situation is piling up. The wars end is no longer the point at which things will return to something approaching normal. U.S. inflation was at 3.3 percent last month and is expected to rise further, and the second-order effects on goods that are derived from fossil fuels or rely on energyin the latter case, all of themhavent even hit yet. Diesel and jet fuel, the heavy transportation fuels, are rising faster than gasoline. There are trucking costs and fertilizer costs and plastic and aluminum packaging costs, all of which will spark more core inflation, which hasnt budged much relative to more volatile benchmarks like energy.
Then theres the impact on capital flows coming from the Persian Gulf. The major Gulf states are in no position right now to invest, which had hitherto propped up projects and asset managers globally. Losing Gulf state capital might be a bigger deal than losing their oil. The fact that the U.S. is considering a bailout of the United Arab Emirates is a terrible sign....
Ultimately, the markets aversion to reality reflects a problem thats been talked about a lot: the tendency to let short-term thinking dominate over the long-term fundamentals. Algorithmic traders looking for arbitrages or small price movements arent going to internalize a dramatic shock to global supply chains. It has to come at a level of international recognition that the way we have structured the economy is prone to this level of risk. That should have dawned on people after COVID, and so far it hasnt dawned on people now. But it will.
And the article doesn't even go into the anemic job market and consumer confidence.