The stock market is, plainly, no longer simply a concern of the elite. “We like to joke that the markets are not the economy,” Peter Atwater of Financial Insyghts recently told Bloomberg, “but we’ve reached a point now where the economy is the markets.”

In past articles, I’ve covered the rise and risks of retail investing for everyday Americans. To recap: a majority of Americans now own stocks; young women are the fastest growing demographic of investors; and the onset of “commission free” trading has lured millions of us into high-risk trading in speculative stocks and the derivatives market. All of this has taken place under the guise of words like access, equality, and democratization.

Yet recent weeks has seen a spread of predictions of a bubble — and cracks beginning to show in the consumer economy as well as private credit. Faced with all this, there’s perhaps three compelling narratives that can tell us something about what’s happening on the stock market today.