efficient-3
Explanation
This comic is set in a post-Thanos-snap scenario (referencing the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Avengers: Infinity War, where the villain Thanos eliminated half of all life). A character notes: "Yes, technically he killed half of all life. But you can see from the stability of housing prices that the market expects all that to be undone via time travel."
The caption reads: "The finance sector knew Thanos would be defeated before anyone else."
The joke applies efficient market hypothesis to the plot of a superhero movie. The efficient market hypothesis (EMH) is an economic theory stating that asset prices fully reflect all available information. In the comic, if Thanos truly eliminated half the population permanently, housing prices should have crashed -- massive oversupply, half the demand gone. But since prices remained stable, the market had already "priced in" the expectation that the Avengers would use time travel to undo the snap. This is funny because it takes the EMH to an absurd extreme, suggesting that financial markets are so efficient they can predict the plot of a blockbuster movie. It also satirizes the real-world tendency of financial analysts to claim that markets "already knew" about any given event after the fact.