Perhaps the most unhealthy society at present is Donald Trump’s America. Mr Trump’s overtly conservative thinking has split his country and won him few fans overseas – even many of his fellow Republicans, hardly the most socially open-minded group, find him too much to bear. In any respect the political message that has both won him support from a vast caucus of right-leaning voters and opprobrium from liberal opponents is built on the idea that America needs fixing. Yet the US stock market has been flying under his leadership, up 15 per cent since the controversial figure moved into the Oval Office.
The relationship between a broken society and broken stock market is perhaps clearer in Europe, not least in the UK where the huge division over Brexit has coincided with a prolonged period of equity market weakness. It is easy to argue that Brexit and all the market problems that have come with it is a response to the poor economic health of many segments of society – areas of economic deprivation, hit hardest by the export of jobs and the import of cheap labour, were far more likely to vote leave than wealthy, cosmopolitan areas. A similar phenomenon can be seen in continental Europe, where regions of high unemployment have experienced a rise in populist politics and growing scepticism towards the European Union.
Nowhere is this currently more visible than in France, where protests by the so-called gilet jaunes continue to take place in many of the country’s major cities. The origins of the movement lie in a proposed environmental tax that would have seen the poorest in society picking up the tab of France’s climate change policies, but it has grown to encompass many perceived economic injustices, including low wage growth and rising living costs. Such has been the upheaval caused by the gilet jaunes that France’s economic growth forecasts have been slashed.
Perhaps companies should take heed of the situation – protesters are, most recently, taking to the virtual streets of social media to voice their unhappiness at ads from Procter & Gamble’s Gillette and HSBC, which respectively condemn ‘toxic masculinity’ and, seemingly, the ‘Little Englander’ motives behind Brexit. Companies are free to advertise how they like, but potentially alienating customers already expressing discontent at being spoken down to by elites seems unwise – especially when many companies’ own behaviour has hardly been squeaky clean (indeed, P&G and HSBC have been previously censured for price fixing and money laundering). There is more than a suspicion that companies and their executives have enriched themselves at workers’ and customers’ expense for many years – fixing society with a shift to a healthier, more equitable settlement is indeed another risk shareholders cannot ignore.
