The S&P 500 nears its all-time high. Here's why stock markets are defying economic reality
- Written by James Doran, Associate professor/Deputy head of school, UNSW

The stock market is not the economy.
This old and playful maxim is typically not true: often the stock market is a good proxy for the economy and a very good indication of what will happen to it.
But it aptly captures the current divergence between stock markets and the worst economic crisis in a century.
In the United States the NASDAQ (which...