Name: Amoral markets I Short View
Uploaded: 2015-11-19T04:59:19.000Z
Duration: 4 min 38 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic passive voice

Markets are often accused by those on the left of being immoral.

The reaction to the tax in Paris seems to give this the lie,

to what some of called a "patriotic rally" kicking in to lift shares well above where they stood before ISIS killed 129 people on Friday.

Equity markets are showing little in the way of patriotism in fact though,

if they were, the shares to buy to express solidarity with the City of Light,

would be those most exposed to an intensified French terror threat: Aéroports de Paris and Air France-KLM.

Instead, markets are doing their usual job as amoral weighers of likely outcomes.

Both companies saw their shares hard hit on Monday rebounded by less than the market today.

Investors have concluded that extra security checks,

the fear of further attacks somewhat reduces the prospects for French tourism, particularly by air.

Other European hotel in whole, their stocks have also been hurt, particularly France's Accor.

For the amoral processes of the market, have on the other hand, pushed up the price of defense companies.

Demand for heavy weapons to bombard the ISIS help parts of Syria will surely rise, but so too will other aspects of defense.

Even the supposedly cash-strapped UK government already digging deep

to find two billion pounds for extra equipment for the SAS and the resources to hire another 1,900 spies.

French defense and aerospace company Thales was picked immediately as an obvious winner.

With both drones and cybersecurity featuring among its products.

As well as the division of the spoils, investors also need to consider the possible overall effect on the economy.

Attacks have already sparked political backlash across Europe and even bizarrely among republicans in the US.

More obviously relevant though, the insistence by president Hollande

to the need for extra spending on state security trumps European austerity demands, sort of illiberal Keynesian stimulus.

Overall though, the market reactions being relatively subdued.

You can see some of that, there were these sharp drops in Aéroports de Paris, that's the red line,

Relativity overall market, that's the French market here in blue,

and you can see, well as there were quite big drops on the day,

they're really not particularly out of line with the sorts of things that we've seen earlier this year,

and in fact, far less important than what had been going on in the broader market.

We can compare here what happened after the September 11th attacks in 2001.

The US airlines plunged by a third, that's the airline sector there,

and S&P 500 airlines, the blue line shows S&P 500 as a whole,

and Northrop Grumman, there, jumped by a third.

I picked that just as a sample defense stock, but it was one among many to benefit.

Now, this isn't about markets putting a different value on French versus American lives,

there were after all, twenty times as many casualties in 2001.

Market does of course, put much higher value on both French and American lives compared to Syrian lives,

where as many people that has died in Paris died pretty much every day unnoticed by investors.

They don't spend much, so really don't matter to global stock markets.

Really, smaller reaction in Europe than in the US,

flex the fact that what happened doesn't appear to be a major turning point, unlike 2001.

France and its European allies, they spent a little more on defense.

And they may pummel ISIS controlled areas of Syria a little harder.

European Central Bank might be somewhat more willing to ease monetary policy again at next month's meeting.

While a specifics of Friday night's tragic attacks were shocking, more terror attacks in Europe were widely expected.

And almost certainly be more to come too, for all the spending by governments.

For the moment, investors are betting that Parisians and the rest of the continent will carry on with their lives,

and there'll be little lasting effect on most companies' costs, revenues or profits.

And this might of course turn out not to be correct, but it's amoral not immoral.