Two plus two keeps coming out at seven.
Sometimes minus three. Only now and then does it land on four, and even then it feels like an accident.
The market sets a record. The same week, the economy barely moves, and your own bank balance does nothing at all. Three numbers that are all supposed to be describing the same country, and none of them agree. So we go looking for someone who can make the sum work. Someone with a clean story. The market's up, so we're fine. Or the market's a bubble, so we're doomed. Pick whichever tidy answer suits the mood you're already in.
Both are wrong, and for the same reason. The index was never a picture of the country.
Deloitte's chief economist put it plainly earlier this year. An index like the FTSE 100 is a small huddle of very large, very global companies. Roughly three-quarters of what they earn comes from outside Britain. Technology makes up more than a third of the American market and about a tenth of the American economy. Of the five million or so companies registered in the UK, about one in a thousand is listed at all. So when you watch the index, you're watching a handful of global giants price up next year's profits. You're not watching Britain go to work.
Which means a rising market isn't proof that things are fine. And a flat economy isn't proof that things are grim. The two were never as connected as the headline needs them to be.
But that isn't the interesting part. The interesting part is us.
We can't sit with “it depends.” We hear “I'm not sure yet” and something switches off. The voice that hedges, that says the honest thing about an uncertain world, gets almost no airtime. The
confident voice wins, on money the same way it wins on politics and most other things, by handing us a clean answer to a question that doesn't have one.
I have versions of this conversation often. Someone comes in worried, or worse, comes in sure. Sure the market says one thing, sure the news says another, wanting me to confirm which of the tidy stories is the right one. Usually the honest reply is that both stories are simpler than the thing they're describing, and sitting with that discomfort is the actual work.
The maths doesn't add up because you're adding up the wrong things. The market, the economy and your own life were never the same sum. Wanting them to be is the most understandable mistake there is, and I still catch myself making it.