On Wednesday morning, a still-unknown assailant shot and killed the CEO of controversial health insurance company UnitedHealthcare outside the New York Hilton Midtown, where parent company UnitedHealth Group was about to hold an investor meeting. Even though that meeting was naturally canceled, UnitedHealth’s investors didn’t seem too perturbed. In fact, outside of a brief dip in the immediate aftermath of the murder, UnitedHealth’s share value made a hefty rebound and closed Wednesday evening at $610.79—its highest level in a month, and not too far below the year-to-date peak UNH saw just after the election ($625.25).
Does that make any sense? Sure, yes, there was a healthy financial outlook projected for the company in 2025. And the stock did begin to correct a little on Thursday, sinking below the $600 threshold, but getting nowhere near the year-to-date nadir the stock reached in April ($439.20).
Keep in mind, this was a year when UnitedHealth traders kept selling off their shares, the company was sued by the federal government to block a planned acquisition, the personal information of nearly 100 million customers was stolen in a Russian cyberattack, and UnitedHealth was found to have both exploited veterans and deployed an algorithm to deny millions of Americans coverage for mental health treatment. Yet the CEO’s assassination, a shocking event to cap off an ignominious year, took an immediate back seat to internal buzz of promising financial tidings.
Put it this way: Do you think shareholders for one of the 10 largest companies in the world were looking to the reactions across social media—which were overwhelmingly poking fun at the deceased and reminding readers that UnitedHealth has generated its revenue largely through deceptive means, to the point that the American Economic Liberties Project once published a “UnitedHealth Group Abuse Tracker”—and concluding that the sentiment will have no severe impact on their bottom line, and the firm’s?
Perhaps that’s a naïve question, considering that over the past few years, Americans experienced an ever-widening divergence between how the stock market is doing and how they’re doing individually. No, the stock market alone is not The Economy, but it continues to be cited as a “traditional indicator” of economic well-being that is supposed to be registered thus by the public. As the Brookings Institution explained in an October report, stock market performance was generally considered one of four main metrics that, before the pandemic, served as a reliable predictor of Americans’ economic satisfaction. The other three metrics: unemployment, inflation, and consumption habits.
Obviously, this formula got skewed in post-pandemic economic recovery, with prices burning in voters’ minds more deeply than anything else. As my colleague Shirin Ali and I have noted, there are myriad pain points for Americans not at all covered by these variables: Modern inflation gauges don’t incorporate swelling costs of mortgages, debt, and insurance; the high “aggregate consumption” of the 2020s is mostly made up of consumers spending on those very necessities; low unemployment and a strong job market covered for the fact that college graduates often faced high rates of underemployment; and stock market performance writ large operated at heights far away from harsher realities on the ground. UnitedHealth may have been a “good” stock this year, but the number of Americans without health insurance grew this year.
That’s not a coincidence. The CEO of the American Hospital Association pointed out in a July 2021 article that UnitedHealth Group earned $9.2 billion in a single quarter in 2020 due to “broad-based deferral of care.” That means they profited off “missed childhood vaccinations, reduced access to opioid misuse treatment and avoided emergency care for cardiac arrest.”
“But even this isn’t the full story,” he added. “Throughout the course of the pandemic, United pursued a number of changes to its policies to further restrict patients’ coverage. United didn’t just profit from avoided care, it actively sought to scale back what care it would pay for at the same time.”
In other words: The health of UnitedHealth’s stock price clearly does not correlate with Americans’ financial (or physical) health. If anything, one of the most valuable companies in the world, and one of the biggest stock market players on the charts, benefits from an upswing in American precarity.
For experienced analysts, this disparity may seem obvious. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic depression, plenty of observers noted how jarring it was to see the stock market continue to roar above it all. “The stock market is not the economy” would thus become a favored phrase among the commentariat, with esteemed writers like Paul Krugman stressing how the ticker charts mainly reflect corporate profits and long-term projections over anything else.
Far more twisted, however, is the fact that the COVID markets boom actually did make a perverse sense for a few telling reasons: The federal government acted quickly to pour money into the pocketbooks of unemployed Americans, small businesses, and (yes) giant corporations, via flawed but effective programs; the Federal Reserve kept interest rates low for the sake of investment rejuvenation; the sectors that were hardest hit by the pandemic tended to revolve around smaller brick-and-mortar establishments, while tech-based sectors that could adapt easier to virtual and remote work did just fine—and acted as far bigger drivers of overall stock market performance.
The pandemic was one thing, but what happened after its peak was much weirder and less discussed when it came to the “stock market = economy?” discourse. (One exception: some renewed chatter when stocks soared, again, in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection.) After all, Wall Street has very recently failed another historical predictor. Per a preelection CNN Business analysis: “In all but two elections since 1944, the incumbent party has won the race for the White House when the S&P 500 advanced between the end of July and Halloween.” As we all know, Democrats did not win, despite the S&P’s rigorous health this fall.
To understand why Americans weren’t in tune with the S&P, you can just look back at their investment habits throughout the Biden years. There was the meme-stock craze of early 2021, which spurred some premature adulation of a group of Reddit-addled proles taking back the financial system for their own—even though their potency did not last long at all. There was the crypto mania that exploded that year, only to come crashing down hard in 2022 when interest rates went up and fraudsters like Sam Bankman-Fried were exposed. There was the surge in legalized sports betting, whose addictive nature has fueled a devastating financial crush among willing gamblers. There were the people who began buying actual gold bricks again, in turn ditching market-oriented investment instruments like exchange-traded funds.
Those are the places where most retail traders turned during a decade that saw their pockets fattened thanks to government stimulus and, frankly, virtual scams abetted by the increased digitization of money and by A.I. advances. That’s where we turn to another weird market development: what artificial intelligence hype hath wrought.
In the two years since ChatGPT’s debut, there’s been one truly consistent market story: already highly capitalized Big Tech firms retaining their investors’ bullishness (and driving stock market performance as a whole) simply through promises of A.I. wonders to come. The chipmaker Nvidia, never the most valuable stock, has surged greatly upon the broader realization that its tech will be useful for powering A.I. training. Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have far outperformed other companies on the S&P and Nasdaq indices almost solely off repeated promises for new A.I. goodies—no matter how expensive, resource-intensive, unprofitable, deceptive, buggy, and straight-up undeliverable these pledges really are.
But ordinary Americans are not stowing their cash here; the most moneyed oligarchs are doing so. (In fact, many Americans are pushing back against the buildout of A.I. data centers in their neighborhoods, a bit of infrastructure that Big Tech considers essential for its valuations.) About 62 percent of the country’s population participates in the stock market at some level, but that number is not as impressive as it may seem: In 2023, per the Federal Reserve, the richest 10 percent owned 93 percent of available equities on the market, while the bottom 50 percent owned just 1 percent—a record in the charted gap between the richest and poorest investors. Even then, the Federal Reserve has found that just 21 percent of American households directly own specific shares; most have investments “exposed” to the market through retirement portfolios, and few people actually make use of instruments like mutual funds.
The stock market has always been a rich person’s game, but it’s never been clearer than now. Americans are saddled with a lot of debt, and willing to look for get-rich-quick schemes that operate outside of Wall Street—especially as fewer new companies go public these days, thanks to swollen interest rates, and as private equity takes more assets off the wider market. Thus, a memecoin launched by Haliey “Hawk Tuah” Welch can earn greater immediate traction than an excitable IPO. Legal gambling on elections and sports can command billions of dollars in volume. Holding on to real gold can seem a lot more stable than zigzagging lines on a chart.
The broader American indifference toward stocks isn’t likely to resolve anytime soon. As Bloomberg pointed out back in June, tech stocks’ record goodwill has sat in stark contrast with a different sector that normally helps to prop up the financial markets: consumer discretionary goods, aka the unneeded products that Americans buy when they have some disposable income. That sector was the second-worst performer in the S&P 500, even though it usually is strong enough to guide the direction of the index. That seems a much more reliable indicator of how Americans are feeling, overshadowed though it may be by tech hype.
But the A.I. hype can’t last forever without delivering some real profit and returns. And when that sector drops and drags Wall Street down with it, Americans invested elsewhere will probably perceive the plunge as old news.
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