John Authers, Columnist

A Trillion-Dollar Paradox Stalks the Stock Market

Symptoms of mania and deep economic pessimism are co-existing in the same environment.

January 24, 2020 at 5:30 AM UTC

John Authers is a senior editor for markets and Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former chief markets commentator at the Financial Times, he is author of “The Fearful Rise of Markets.”

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Some stocks are on a remarkable run. To name just a few: Alphabet Inc., the parent of Google, is now the world’s third trillion-dollar company by market cap, joining Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc., with Amazon.com Inc. apparently soon to follow; Tesla Inc. is now worth more than $100 billion, making it twice the size of General Motors Co., the next largest U.S. auto-manufacturer; and Netflix Inc., despite spending prodigious amounts of money and facing ever more competition, has just had its best day on the market in more than 12 months.