After watching the real world bad news keep coming and seeing the US stock market substantially stay at the same level I’m getting the impression that a possible reason for the stocks not dropping more is that all options appear equally bad and that uncertainty is having a paralyzing impact.
Is it even possible that a stock market is stable, despite an objectively worse outlook, simply because the alternative investments are also facing negative outlooks. Are there any historical large scale examples of this occuring? And if so, how long was such an abnormal state maintained?