Every day, the network news reports changes in the stock market using the Dow Jones average. The Dow is calculated by the Dow Jones Corporation, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, and measures changes each day in the stock prices of 30 large corporations.
Stocks are shares of ownership in corporations.
So the amount that investors are willing to pay for stocks tells us what they think about the well-being of corporate America. Then the Dow will rise. Over the very long run, the stock market has gone up as corporate profits have increased. Yet the market's swings are much more extreme than the ups and downs of production and corporate incomes. Also, some observers think that the more that wealth is redistributed to the top earners, the more they will speculate in the market with their ready cash.