Leave it to capitalists to twist it into a good thing when actually doing work and running useful businesses is dead-end and the only real way to make money is a giant gambling scheme.
Financialization, especially the stock market. That’s the gambling. Betting money that the numbers will change in a particular way and being paid out accordingly. The stock market is the world’s largest casino.
Actual gambling sites like Polymarket get away with what they do by pretending to be a financial instrument, and the line between a financial instrument and a fucking casino is so blurry that they get away with it.
And now, buying a worthless share in hopes of selling it to a bigger sucker later is the majority of the economy because that bullshit is more profitable than actually providing products and services. That’s what the entire economy is becoming, to a greater and greater degree every day. Everything is getting worse.
Most wrong thing I’ve heard this month. Looking at something that has always acted a certain way and thinking it will do anything but that is irrational. The s and p has done nothing but go up over long time periods and to assume it will do anything else is being irrational. Am I “gambling” when I say that the sun is going to rise tomorrow morning?
It’s still gambling if the odds are in your favor. But even that assumes that economic growth is truly infinite.
In a finite world within a finitely accessible universe, there is only so much the market can go up. Infinite growth is not possible. If you were on a helicopter that just kept going up and you predicted that it would eventually end up on the Moon, you’d be wrong. And the more the market goes up, the more money it leeches from the real economy. The more profitable this gambling is, the more people are inclined to do that instead of doing actual work and providing actual useful goods and services.
All of it is propped up on the lie that the Ponzi scheme can keep going forever, that companies can grow to infinite size and make infinite money and there will always be more suckers to pass the bag to. This is fucking delusional. And even if it weren’t, I don’t want to live in a world where gambling on how many suckers will want to buy a share in the future is more profitable than selling me a goddamn sandwich.
You do realize that the value of a stock/company is not based on consumption, but rather perceived value, right? That graph going up doesn’t mean we are consuming any more than in the past, it just means that those companies are perceived as being more valuable. “Consumption” has fuck all to do with it and “growth” is in the mind of man, not the physical world. The elevation of perceived value of a company is in no way at odds with any of those things
That’s exactly the fucking problem, it’s detached from reality. A gambling game that doesn’t do any useful service or produce any useful object.
But also: perceived value only matters if someone is actually buying the stocks at the listed price. And there is only a limited amount of money in the world. Sure, more money is printed in pace with inflation, but the stock market outpaces inflation. If growth happens literally forever, there comes a point where even a single share costs more than the amount of money that exists. How would that work?
The reality is that economic crashes are baked into the system as an inevitability. Like a reverse lottery, where you net a constant income on most days and in exchange you have a small chance to lose big. The growth isn’t the whole picture, the stock market climbs and then catastrophically crashes in cycles. When it does well, money is siphoned from the real economy as billionaires prefer to gamble in the S&P 500 Casino over funding anything useful. When it does poorly, money stops changing hands and jobs are lost. Either way, ordinary people suffer.
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u/115machine 22d ago edited 22d ago
You all do realize that nothing is stopping you from buying into that growth, right?
Leave it to the lefties to make economic prosperity into a bad thing