> Yet when you go and look at the long-term graph, it's well within normal variance. There's no evidence they're connected at all.

What a completely mathematically and financially illiterate thing to say. Whether or not a market move is within “normal” variance has nothing to do with whether or not it is clearly attributable to a particular economic event. If Jerome Powell says something about rates or Trump tweets something about tariffs and the market moves 1% in the exact minute that happens you can pinpoint the cause of the move with pretty high confidence even if 1% is not significant relative to the long term variance.

I’ve seen this bizarre sentiment propagated on HN before. A lot of people seem to think it’s never possible to identify the causes of market movements (even when obvious market moving news is released).