Investment professionals on Wall Street spend their days reading financial reports and looking at numbers flash on screens. These numbers record the moment-to-moment changes in the collective wisdom of markets about the value of stocks, bonds, commodities and a distressing array of derivative financial products. From the comfort of the sealed caverns of Wall Street the actual physical and social world is just an abstraction to be quantified and analyzed. One of Wall Street’s most prominent investment research and management firms released an analysis that says the coronavirus won’t be all that bad for the economy. Analysts from Morningstar Inc.—which is actually headquartered in Chicago’s cavernous downtown—say that this pandemic will be a “mild pandemic.” I’m not sure how pandemics can be mild, but the analysts outline cases for “moderate” and “severe pandemics.” One of the things that gives these analysts such a sanguine view, particularly in the United […]