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SEEKING ALPHA reports: With business outlooks hindered by a dealmaking drought and sluggish market conditions in ...
SEEKING ALPHA‘s The Heisenberg writes:
– Nearly two months into the most acute crisis in a century, market participants are pondering a series of existential questions.
– Efforts to collect data quantify economic activity have been rendered somewhat meaningless in a world where such activity is literally forbidden.
– Asset prices of all kinds are one part administered and one part pure abstraction, although it’s no longer clear from what that abstraction emanates.
– I never thought I’d live to see a dystopian future, but that future is now. Here are some fresh thoughts on markets and the economy in these surreal times.
I never thought I’d live to see a dystopian future.
Writers more gifted than myself (not to mention innumerable artists and some of the most accomplished directors in the history of film) have conjured their own distinct versions of how such a future state might look – and what it would entail for the people living in it.
I) ‘Lifeline’
On a blinding Saturday morning, while squinting unhappily at a too-big pile of mail through a pair of Helmut Lang aviators on the back deck, the cover of the April 13 edition of The New Yorker stuck out.
It’s a piece by Pascal Campion called “Lifeline.” In it, a worker delivering something essential (food, probably) stands under a lighted awning amid towering high-rises and rings the buzzer. Just a few feet away, his bicycle rests precariously against a light pole. It’s raining. It’s dark. The streets are deserted.
The visual is, to quote Françoise Mouly, who interviewed Campion, “a nod” to the essential worker “and to his place in a silenced metropolis.”
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