The "economy", despite the constant mismatch, is NOT the stock market. The stock market is vital to bolster capitalism's workings but does NOT translate into a better life for the vast majority of its citizens. It does make some people very wealthy, and they will and do use that wealth to make sure that things generally keep getting a little bit worse for everybody else.
These obscene amounts of money were ostensibly not available over the years for a top-class health or education service, nor for decent homes and jobs. Instead, when capitalism starts to stumble, money is quickly thrown at the business community, ie given to corporations, that then spend it on buying back their own shares as so many of their top directors depend on the share price for their jobs and bonuses. They do not buy bonds as interest rates are kept so low; but they do accumulate debt for themselves, for the same reason, meaning that indebtedness soars even as money is thrown at them. This money, in essence just printed up, will be paid for by you and me and the next generations in reduced public services, the merming of our scant savings, the loss of our jobs and the further reduction of our remaining rights. It will not save the stock market this time in any case. Money will be thrown at the markets but the system is now so rotten to the core that it will be like throwing money at a black hole. High inflation is on the horizon, good for those who have debts, bad for those who have managed to save a bit (but are not owners of large tracts of land).
We are locked in our homes, being bombarded with scary messages, being led to believe that this coronavirus is like the Black Death - although the number of fatalities is risibly low -, or like the misnamed Spanish flu. Curiously Wikipedia has just revised downwards its mortality rate for Spanish flu and its new rate is now entirely incompatible with the number of people who actually died. Some have suggested that Wikipedia has done this in order to make people think that the current coronavirus is as dangerous as Spanish flu and that hundreds of millions will die. They will not. We live in regions where there is clean water, for a start, and conditions have absolutely nothing to do with the Late Middle Ages or with countries devastated by war and hunger.
But the capitalist venture continues apace meanwhile, undebated and not voted for. I notice that Mike Pompeo in the US is once again ramping it up about human rights in Iran (at the very moment that we are in lock-down over here and ostensibly without so many of our most basic rights); and that the British MOD (Ministry of Defence) has just ensured that the crimes soldiers commit abroad, as they trample over the rights of people in foreign lands in search of plunder, now expire after 5 years. This legislation is, apparently, to stop ‘vexatious’ claims.
No lock-down for the military it seems.
