Reflections on a Headline That Should Not Have Been News

One does try, every morning, to skim the news before the coffee arrives at the correct temperature, and one is rewarded, more often than not, with a headline so breathlessly astonished by the perfectly obvious that one nearly sends the tray back on principle alone. Today's specimen: Microsoft and Amazon's shares rose after they reported strong earnings, and the poor darlings of financial journalism are calling this a "reaction," as though anyone with a functioning trust fund and a rudimentary understanding of how money behaves around itself was ever holding their breath.

I want to be delicate about this, because I know the phrase "investor confidence" is meant to sound terribly sophisticated, the sort of phrase one says while adjusting one's cufflinks, but really, when you strip away all the little flourishes, what the article is telling us is this: two enormous piles of money made more money, and other, smaller piles of money rushed over to stand near them. That is the whole of it. That is the entire drama. And people are calling this news the way one might call a sunrise "breaking."

Do you see the problem? The problem is that "confidence" implies there was ever a moment of doubt, and doubt, as a concept, has always struck me as something that happens to other people, in the way that public transportation happens to other people, or queueing happens to other people. One does not sit at breakfast wondering whether Microsoft will continue existing. One simply assumes it will, the way one assumes the house will still be standing when one returns from the Riviera, and when it turns out one was correct, the newspapers act as though a great mystery has been solved. It hasn't. Big, well-run things that already have all the money tend to continue having all the money. This is not confidence. This is arithmetic, and I find it faintly embarrassing that grown adults with financial degrees need a weekly earnings report to remind them of it.

What I find truly poignant — and I do mean that with the fullest tenderness I am capable of, which father tells me is considerable — is the idea of an "investor" as some sort of nervous little figure, hunched over a screen, genuinely unsure whether his position will be validated by Thursday. One pictures him sweating, you know? Refreshing something. I am told this is called "checking your portfolio," which sounds exhausting in a way I cannot personally verify, because my own arrangement has always been that father's people handle the checking, and I handle the enjoying, and never the two shall meet. It had simply never occurred to me that somewhere out there, actual humans experience something like suspense regarding whether Amazon will continue to be an extremely large and successful company. The suspense of it! As though it might, on any given Tuesday, simply stop.

This is the strange little window this article opens for me, and I confess I climbed through it and looked around for a while. Because "the market reaction reflects investor confidence" is, when you translate it out of finance-speak and into plain English, actually a sentence about anxiety. It is a sentence about people who do not have enough of a cushion beneath them that a single earnings call could not, in theory, rearrange their entire week. And I do think that's rather sad, though I want to be careful here, because I am not laughing at anyone in particular — I would never, that would be crude — I am simply observing, with the detached curiosity of an anthropologist who has wandered into a documentary about people who check things. The poors check things. It's one of the great unifying behaviors of the class, isn't it — checking. Checking the weather because they must walk somewhere in it. Checking their bank balance before a purchase, which is a sentence I find genuinely difficult to picture the mechanics of, in the way one struggles to picture a color that doesn't exist. Checking, now, apparently, whether the stock went up. It's all just so much checking, when one could simply not.

One simply doesn't check. That's rather the whole of my philosophy, if you press me for one over lunch. One arranges one's affairs such that the affairs arrange themselves, and then one goes and does something pleasant with one's actual, finite hours on this earth — a fitting, a regatta, the correct sort of lunch — instead of hovering over a number on a screen hoping it agrees with you. I am told this requires "capital," which I gather is the polite financial term for what I would simply call "asking father," and I do see how, for people without a father in the relevant sense — by which I mean a father with, shall we say, structural liquidity — this entire category of solution is unavailable to them, and that does strike me as a genuine design flaw in how the world has been arranged. Not a flaw in them, you understand. A flaw in the arrangement. I am endlessly sympathetic to people caught in bad arrangements. I simply cannot picture staying in one.

And here is the part that actually troubles me, in my breezy way: the article treats "strong earnings" as an event that happened to these companies, a piece of weather that blew through and left everyone pleasantly surprised, when surely — surely — enormous, well-staffed companies with armies of extremely competent people are not so much "reporting strong earnings" as "doing, once again, the thing they always do, on schedule, as expected." The surprise is manufactured. The suspense is theater. It is rather like being shocked, genuinely shocked, that the good hotel was lovely again this year. My dear, of course it was. That is what the good hotel is for. One does not applaud the good hotel for continuing to be good; one simply continues to stay there, and lets the lesser hotels sort out their own difficulties, whatever those may be — staffing, I'm told, is one of them, which sounds ghastly, having to find people to do the things, and then presumably paying them, and then presumably worrying about whether they'll stay, and truly, at a certain point, wouldn't it just be easier to ask father to buy the hotel outright and make the whole staffing question someone else's Tuesday?

I don't say any of this with cruelty, you understand — I want that terribly clear, because I know how it can read. I am not sneering down some grand staircase at the little people refreshing their brokerage apps. I am, if anything, moved by them, the way one is moved by footage of very small, very determined animals doing something enormously effortful for what turns out to be a very small reward. The market went up. Everyone may exhale. And somewhere, someone who was not remotely worried in the first place will read this headline over a coffee that is, I hope, at the correct temperature, and feel, briefly, a small and completely unearned sense of vindication on behalf of two companies that were never, not for one afternoon, actually in any doubt.

Do try not to check the number again today. It will still be large tomorrow. It rather always is, for the people it's large for.

Toodles — Cynthia