So that is pretty strong evidence against my pet hypothesis that the market expects that a dollar in the future will buy less value. While I suppose it is _possible_ that the expectation is that the cost of things not included in the CPI's basket of goods will increase much faster than the cost of things included in the CPI's basket of goods, that seems like quite a stretch, and I see no particular reason COVID would make that more the case now than it was 3 months ago.

At this point I am very confused about current market valuations. The market is only down around 10% from its peak valuation, implying that people smarter than I am think that the combined effects of the shutdown of large parts of the economy for an indefinite period plus whatever downstream effects the resulting bankruptcies / disruption have only reduce the collective net present value of publicly traded companies by around 10%. As a layperson I wouldn't be surprised to see fully 10% of publicly traded companies by market cap go bankrupt, which I expect would eliminate that 10% of NPV right then and there. But right now if you think there's a better than 50% chance of a 10% drop in the S&P 500 before the end of the year, you can make a killing on stock options (sell puts at ~330 to ~340). So clearly people are putting their money where their mouth is when it comes to betting that COVID won't have further massive impacts, so I must be missing something.

I'm really wondering what I'm missing though. Maybe 10% of companies by market cap going bankrupt is actually really implausible, or maybe there's an expectation that existing publicly traded companies will expand to fill in the niches left by the companies that die off. It's kind of maddening not understanding what's going on though.