No, don't close the stock markets, really, don't

There’s a bit of chatter floating around that possibly the stock markets will be closed over the coronavirus problems. No, don’t do this, really, don’t do it.

It’s entirely true that said markets are bouncing all over the place. But that’s because no one actually knows what is going to happen. We’re facing that uncertainty, not risk.

What needs to be remembered is the efficient markets hypothesis. Which doesn’t say that markets are the efficient manner of doing everything. It doesn’t even say that markets are the efficient method of allocating capital - although they largely are. Instead it says only that markets are efficient at processing information.

So, we face uncertainty. And at some point that uncertainty will collapse down into actual knowledge. Either because the thing(s) will have happened or because the knowledge in general of what will becomes available. We would like that knowledge, as it becomes available - that is, as information about infection rates, communicability, death rates and all that - to be processed. We’d even like to know, as best we can, what is the collective and aggregate opinion on what people and governments are trying to do about the current problems.

Markets are that information processing system. Closing them down just when we so desperately desire to use them for this process would be the utmost perversity.

Or, as we might put it, we can certainly dislike the messages brought to us by market prices, even rail against them, but they are reality as best we can work out what that is. Reality being rather what we’re supposed to take note of, the more extreme our situation the more this is so.