How American stocks could continue to climb

IN THE “Society of the Spectacle”, published in the 1960s, Guy Debord, a leading theorist in a group of provocateurs known as the Situationists, depicts a culture in thrall to mass media where appearance is more important than fact and representation is preferred to reality. It is an unsettling book and not one that finance types would normally reach for. But after a strange year, the idea of the markets as spectacle has an appealing logic. A Debordian might say that their primary role is no longer capital allocation, or even enrichment, but entertainment. How else to make sense of stock prices driven haywire by social-media mobs or celebrities selling shares in shell companies?