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ceiling that it brushed up against in Jan-
uary and February.
Still, the comeback was good enough
to excite Lou Dobbs, the Fox Business
commentator. ‘‘On Wall Street today...
stocks skyrocketing!’’ he told his audience
on Friday night. The screen cut to green
bars of the three major stock indexes,
with three green northbound arrows.
Dobbs chanted the numbers as though
they were a home-team box score. Then
the broadcast cut to a printout of the day’s
minute-by-minute ticker. Floating above
the rising line were some black zigzags
that faintly resembled cursive letters:
the president’s signature. Trump was
already eager to declare his victory over
the virus’s economic symptoms, even as

the government’s response to the disease
itself was just beginning.
‘‘The president celebrating his, uh,
signature day today,’’ Dobbs said, stum-
bling a bit as he downshifted from bullish
incantation. ‘‘The White House sent along
to me a, uh’’ — and here he chuckled —
‘‘signed chart of the skyrocketing Dow.’’
There is so much to Dobbs’s chuckle:
an acknowledgment of the shameless-
ness of Trump’s gesture tempered by an
almost parental familiarity with his ras-
cally ways, with notes, even, of complicity
and grudging appreciation. Trump and
Dobbs, after all, were each working hard
to shore up an endangered idea — that the
smart thing to do with your money is to
buy and hold a portfolio consisting mostly

of diversifi ed stocks and to keep hanging
onto that portfolio no matter how much it
goes down, because the American econ-
omy is a good bet over the long run, and
stocks will always, inevitably, go back up,
providing average annualized returns of
5 to 7 percent a year to those who are
stalwart enough to ride out the bumps,
thus vindicating the stock market as
something more than a zero-sum game.
In good times, this advice seems like a
scientifi c law of nature. When things go
bad, it’s something closer to a religion.
After Friday, as the scale of potential
American deaths became clear, the Dow
began to spurn Trump’s supplications.
Trump, like an ardent suitor, gave chase.
His once-obscure Coronavirus Task Force

‘‘BIGGEST
STOCK MARKET
RISE IN
HISTORY
YESTERDAY!’’
President
Trump on Twitter,
March 14

‘‘The Dow had its
worst point
drop ever as stocks
tumbled again.’’
CNN, March 16
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