Here’s what a $1.9 trillion stimulus deal cannot seem to buy: a stock market rebound

Good morning, Bull Sheeters, and happy International Women’s Day to you all.

The Senate’s passage of the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill over the weekend had a brief stimulative effect on stock futures. But that’s beginning to unravel as the markets’ big nemesis, bond yields, creeps higher. The 10-year Treasury yield is above 1.61%, as I type—a 13-month high.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Friday said rising bond yield is a sign of a growing economy in the making, not an inflationary shock. The markets didn’t get that memo, apparently.

In today’s essay, I’m taking you to a place that means a lot to me, to bring you the story of some courageous women.

But first, let’s check in on the markets.

Markets update

Asia

• The major Asia indexes are mostly lower in afternoon trading, with the Hang Seng down 1.4%.
• China‘s Meitu, makers of an app that performs digital touch-ups on your selfies, announced it had purchased a combined $40 million worth of Ether and bitcoin; the cryptocurrencies climbed over night, before falling.
• Brent crude briefly topped $71 this weekend after the Saudi military thwarted a drone attack on the Ras Tanura export terminal on the country’s Persian Gulf coast.

Europe

• The European bourses were solidly higher with the Stoxx Europe 600 up 0.7% at the open.
• Shares in General Electric were off 0.3% in pre-market trading on news the company is on the verge of inking a $30 billion-plus deal to combine its aircraft-leasing business with Ireland’s AerCap, the Wall Street Journal reports in a scoop.
• Another vestige of the Trump trade war fell over the weekend when the U.S. and EU agreed to suspend punitive levies on products like French wine, German pastries and Italian hard cheeses that got caught up in the Airbus-Boeing trade dispute. On Thursday, the U.K. and Biden Administration reached a similar truce around products like Scottish whisky.

U.S.

• U.S. futures have been inching lower throughout the morning. That’s after the Nasdaq fell more than 2% last week as the sell-off in tech stocks continues.
• The GameStop frenzy is breathing new life into a still-longshot movement in Congress to tax stock, bond and derivative trades. One plan calls for a 0.1% levy, which would raise an estimated $60 billion a year.
• Speaking of the T-word… if you made a bit of money on crypto trades last year, yes, you probably owe taxes. Here are the crypto tax rules.
• What’s on the calendar this week? Disney’s AGM (tomorrow), and earnings from Oracle, Qualcomm and Adidas (Wednesday).

Elsewhere

• Gold is lower, trading below $1,700/ounce. The shiny yellow metal is down more than 10% YTD.
• The dollar is up.
• As is crude. Brent is trading a touch above $70/barrel, off earlier highs.
• At 10 a.m. Rome time, Bitcoin is down, trading just below $50,000.

***

Mahila

Four years ago, on International Women’s Day, I spent much of the morning seated on a plastic chair in the back row of a packed courtyard. I had my notebook out, and scribbled down plenty of notes. Satyam, sitting next to me, translated just about everything—from Telugu into English.

We were on the rural outskirts of Amaravati, in Andhra Pradesh, India. Hundreds of women came from all over the countryside to listen to speaker after speaker advocate for economic justice. When the speeches wrapped up, they marched into the town’s central square chanting slogans demanding greater protections for women, free schooling for all young girls, and greater equality between men and women.

Believe it or not, there are parts of the world where these ideas are pretty radical. But it’s not so radical in Amaravati these days.

I was there with the Italian filmmaker Sabrina Varani. We were making a film about India’s Dalit women.

The Dalits were once referred to as the “untouchables”—in Sanskrit, the “shattered ones.” For generations and generations, the Dalits had very few rights. They couldn’t own land. They couldn’t go to school. They couldn’t access most social services. They were shut out of India’s blur of progress. It was a kind of apartheid. And within the Dalit community, the most oppressed were the Dalit women.

“I felt they were triply oppressed: because of their gender, because of their caste, because of their economic situation,” Sr. Sabina Pathrose, a lawyer and women’s rights activist who’s fought for rural and Dalit women for decades as a member of the religious order, the Good Shepherd Sisters, told us.

In the film, “Mahila”—Mahila is Telugu for woman—we featured the story of three generations of Dalit women: 13-year-old Indira, the first female in her family to attend school; Jaysree, an entrepreneur who helped to organize the women in her village to form a cooperative; and Mari Rani, the first Dalit woman to be elected president of her local village. They are part of a larger movement that’s tapping into the wisdom, vitality and creativity of all these enterprising young women to build an economic powerhouse, village by village, town by town, city by city.

I wanted to share this morning a snippet of their story—I’ll get back to stocks and bonds tomorrow—because I think of these women a lot. Their bravery, resourcefulness and determination continue to inspire me. I’d like to go back and visit them some day, to check in on their journey, and hopefully bring my daughters with me.

I did get a partial update over the weekend: Illiteracy still holds back the co-op business, they told me. They dreamed of opening a line of dairy products, but they couldn’t quite crack the market. However, business is steady enough to provide the capital needed to issue fellow co-op members small business loans. That economic security, in turn, can be seen around the village. More girls are going to school. More families are eking out a living. I’m sure those aren’t the only positive results to measure.

India holds a special place in my heart. Everything is dialed up to the extreme: the food, the sights and sounds, and the people. It’s like no place I’ve ever been. There’s a long way to go before the country sees full gender equality, but then we have a long way to go everywhere. In Italy, violence against women and girls is still a shocking blight on the country. In 2020, the overall homicide rate here fell under lockdown while the femicide rate soared.

I’m embarrassed to admit that before I embarked on the Mahila film project a few years back, the whole idea of International Women’s Day seemed a bit abstract to me. Indira, Jaysree and Mari Rani showed me just how uninformed I was.

Happy International Women’s Day, everyone!

***

Bernhard Warner
@BernhardWarner
Bernhard.Warner@Fortune.com

As always, you can write to bullsheet@fortune.com or reply to this email with suggestions and feedback.

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Market candy

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