Stock markets rose on news far worse than expected

Evidence

Share markets do rise in response to bad news, but only when the news, however awful, turns out at least somewhat better than anticipated. Had stockbrokers predicted, say, a 22 per cent fall in the UK’s national income, markets would have had good cause to rise if the actual fall on the day was ‘only’ 20.4 per cent. Except that, on that Wednesday, the markets were expecting a drop of no more than 15 per cent. That’s what made 12 August 2020 so bizarre: news far worse than anticipated had caused the share market to rise. Nothing like it had happened before. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 372

Categorization

• XREF: The 2008 crash and central bank money-printing lineage that this book keeps tracing back to.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 372