Image Credit: Fitz Henry Lane, “Lumber Schooners at Evening on Penobscot Bay” (1863), National Gallery of Art via Wikimedia Commons

Investing, once a necessity, has become a luxury.

“In the 1930s we had the Great Depression, in 2008 we had the start of the Great Recession and now we are facing the Great Cessation,” says John Cammack, a private investor and former executive at T. Rowe Price Group Inc. in Baltimore. The global economic lockdown to combat the spread of coronavirus, he says, is “stopping the many small actions that make up Adma Smith’s marketplace dead in their tracks.”

Yet Twitter and the internet are full of urgings to invest now, on the belief that the economy will eventually recover and stocks will bounce back — as they always have in the long run, at least in the U.S.…

 

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