The Gospel of Priced In

Moody’s downgraded the U.S. credit outlook due to the $36 trillion debt on Friday. Surprising, but not shocking. Within minutes, someone mentioned it again. That post.

The old WallStreetBets classic. “Everything is priced in.”

It starts as a rant, but it’s basically scripture by the end. The market is omniscient. The market is omnipotent. The market has already priced in not just Amazon’s next earnings, but your next thought. Your birth. Your bus route. Your failures. The heat death of the universe.

You’re not a person. You’re a rounding error.

A line in the post always gets me: “Your consciousness is just an illusion, a product of the omniscient market.” It’s ridiculous, but it’s also not far off from how many people genuinely feel.

Because once you’ve seen enough—recessions that don’t kill bull runs, tech layoffs that boost stock prices, sovereign downgrades that barely move the needle—it starts to look like the market isn’t following logic. It’s operating on faith.

Not your faith. Its own.

This is what makes the post both funny and bleak. It’s written like a joke, but it lands like a eulogy—for free will, for agency, for the idea that any of us matter.

You think Apple hasn’t priced in a dip in AirPods sales?

You think the market didn’t see that downgrade coming?

You think debt, default, disorder—any of it—actually moves anything anymore?

It’s all priced in.

And if it isn’t, it soon will be.

That’s the belief. The cult. A kind of fatalism dressed up as sophistication.

But here’s the problem.

The market isn’t God. It’s just a bunch of people pretending not to blink. It forgets. It overreacts. It invents certainty where there is none. And sometimes it gets caught off guard.

We’ve seen that too. 2008. COVID. Archegos. SVB. Subprime, super prime, no prime.

The downgrade today isn’t surprising. But that doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. It’s a marker. A signal. A story that will evolve in ways no model can fully predict.

But saying “it’s priced in” short-circuits all of that. It flattens time. It lets us pretend that no matter what happens, the system already knows, which means we don’t have to wrestle with what it means.

That kind of thinking doesn’t make you smart. It just makes you tired.

And that’s what this really is. Exhaustion dressed up as insight.

A generation raised on financial collapse and asset bubbles. Told to hustle. Told to disrupt. Told to be early, but not too early. Different, but not too different. Take risks, but don’t lose. Innovate, but don’t scare anyone.

So now we cope. With irony. With memes. With mantras like “everything is priced in.” Not because we believe it. But because believing anything else makes us feel small.

There’s safety in the idea that none of it matters. That the dice were rolled long before we sat down at the table.

But maybe it’s time to push back on that.

Maybe the market doesn’t know as much as we pretend it does.

Maybe it didn’t price in the downgrade, this debt, or the next crisis.

Maybe it didn’t price in you reading this.

It definitely didn’t price in me writing it.

And if it did?

Then I hope it overpaid.