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Dec. 11, 2005 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:19
9 Understanding the Stock Market: Speculation versus Investment
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Hello, and welcome to podcast number three.
This is an ongoing sequence of me chatting away in my car while I'm driving to work.
This is actually take two of a podcast I did earlier this morning.
I tried to get into work, but traffic was too bad.
I had a demo at 9.30, so I had to head back.
Anyway, so what I wanted to talk about today was the stock market.
I know, it's a thrilling topic, but I think that sort of experience, hard-won experience of mine, I think is useful to talk about to others, because the stock market is one of the things that is criticized about the free market.
You know, like it's a roller coaster, it's up and down, it focuses business leadership on short-term numbers rather than long-term growth, and so on.
So, I wanted to talk about the stock market and how government compulsion has destroyed the stability in the stock market, undermined the credibility of stock prices, and corrupted an entire generation of business leadership.
And I think I can speak from somewhat personal experience in this, although I managed to escape the worst of the corruption, I certainly do understand the temptations.
To start, let's look at the stock market and what it's really for.
Its basic function, of course, is to provide capital for companies who can produce returns on that capital by investing in expansion, or plant equipment, or additional workers, or marketing campaigns, or research campaigns, or whatever.
So the idea is that You know, you need to raise money for your business.
You've run out of friends and family to do it through, and so you go to the stock market.
You know, all well and good.
We like the idea and it all makes sense.
So that is a perfectly valid approach to getting investment.
Most businesses, and I can speak from my experience here, that in 1995 I started a software company with my brother and we first and foremost went round with another business partner to, you know, doctors and lawyers and people that we knew, accountants and so on, who wanted to put in 5 or 10k and we We raised about 80k, we started the business there, and over the next couple of years, through a ferocious amount of hard work, we grew the business to, you know, four million dollars a year in revenue.
And then we sold it in 2000, and it got sold again in 2001.
And let me give you the brief story of what happened and why this idea sort of occurred to me, that it would be worthwhile talking about my exciting experiences in the stock market and abstracting those into some general principles that I think will be useful for others.
Well, so we started this company and it did well.
We sold our software, it was environmental software, to a lot of different big companies and everything was going along swimmingly.
And then what happened was we sold the company because we wanted to get more capital to expand into the US, right?
That's the holy grail of the mecca of software companies is success within the United States business market.
And so we sold to a company which had a listing on the Alberta Stock Exchange, which is like not exactly the penny stock corner of Canadian capitalism, but not far.
It's not exactly the Toronto Stock Exchange, which has much more stringent entry and listing requirements.
Now, that company then ended up selling our software company to another company which had a listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange, which is much more prestigious and opens you up to a large number of institutional investors who are only permitted to buy companies, say, on the Toronto Stock Exchange because the other ones are simply considered too risky.
And so our stock price, or the stock price of the parent company, was originally a couple of cents, like five, six, seven cents.
And then, you know, as we began to move upward in the feeding chain or the food chain of stock exchanges, the price of the software began to go up.
Sorry, the price of our stocks began to go up.
And not by a little bit here and there, but by multiples.
So we went from $0.08 to $0.40 to $0.80 to $1, $1.50, $2.00.
I think it peaked around $2.30 or $2.40.
This is in a matter of a month or two or three.
$1.50, $2.00, I think it peaked around $2.30 or $2.40.
This is in a matter of a month or two or three.
And then the stock crashed back down to a penny stock and then basically vanished from view.
And of course, this was quite a roller coaster for me as a business owner and somebody who'd been given stock, the majority of which was an escrow.
Now, escrow stock, for those who don't know, is if I sell a company, if you buy my company, you don't want me to just sell you the company, cash in my stocks and hit the road, because a software company is really only as valuable as the talent that is in it.
And so you want to make sure I'm going to stick around, and the best way to do that is if you give me a million shares in your company in exchange for my company, you want me to get the first shares, the first third of the shares I can sell after one year, the second third after two years, and the third third after three years.
And it's a way of making sure that the talent sticks around when a merger and acquisition takes place.
So I was on a pretty wild roller coaster ride because some of the shares I could sell, some of them I couldn't, and it was a very wild time to be in business.
Of course, late 90s, early 2000s was a pretty exciting time in the software business.
So what happened though, I found, was once we got a listing on the stock exchange, all business management, all long-term business management ceased.
And I found this, of course, amazingly frustrating.
I mean, I had like six CEOs in two years.
People kind of bungeed in and bungeed out.
Nobody made any strategic decisions.
Everybody was just watching the stock price.
And the only news they wanted to hear about was the news related to what the stock was doing.
You know, we were happy to announce a sale, only insofar as that sale would help us to boost the stock price, the sale of our software.
Nobody wanted to hear about any problems.
Nobody wanted to reinvest back in our existing clients because that was not helpful in boosting the short-term stock price.
And so basically the company had a huge jump in stock price and then had a huge collapse in stock price and it was kind of gutted.
Emotionally, financially, it was eviscerated.
And so I guess I had a certain amount of curiosity about what had happened or what was going on.
And I'm sure, you know, those who've had some experience in this know the story, the sad tale of the demise of the, I guess, the emotional energy and intellectual energy of this company, which was that, because it was an environmental company, we were partly bought in order to appeal to green funds, right?
The funds that only invest in green stuff, stuff that's environmentally friendly, because ours was environmental software that fit the bill.
That all of the senior managers gave up on managing the company and basically got involved in what's sometimes called a pump-and-dump where you pump up the value of the stock and then you dump it all and you basically it's a zero-sum game.
It's a cash transfer from those who don't know much about investing to those who know a lot about investing and thus can manipulate things to make them look good.
And even after the stock price went up and down, the only interest that the CEOs of the parent company had was in recovering the value or returning the value to that stock price.
In other words, there was a weird reversal of cause and effect.
In my view, and what I argued for at the time, share price is a reflection of value.
It is not a cause of value.
Like if I finish the basement of my house, The price of the house goes up.
I don't raise the price of my house and then, with the money that I'm going to get, finish the next basement of the house.
I mean, a share price should be a reflection of value, not a cause of value.
But in the topsy-turvy world of the modern stock market, it is, in fact, considered to be a cause of value.
And so, it really corrupts long-term business management.
I mean, picture this, right?
As a CEO, you are entirely judged by most markets on short-term stock price.
And so you've spent, I don't know, like five or seven years in graduate school, you've spent 15 to 20 years rising to the position of CEO, and you then are put in a situation where you can either tell the truth to the markets or you can basically Not lie exactly, but kind of tell them what they want to hear.
The truth of the markets would be, look, here's my five-year plan.
No, there's going to be no immediate rise in stock price.
It's going to be slow and steady wins the race.
We're going to build this thing properly.
We're not going to refuse to reinvest in R&D and client satisfaction and upgrades and so on.
So we're actually going to build this thing for the long haul.
Well, of course, the first thing that the markets are going to do generally is cut your stock price down significantly.
Because you're telling the truth, which is that there's going to be a slow and steady gain that's going to take five years to double the share price.
But they've also got CEOs saying, I can double your share price in three to six months by doing whatever.
I cut R&D, get rid of my programming team, focus on sales and marketing, and basically, you know, eviscerate the future to feed the present, right?
Eat your seed crop, I guess you could call it.
And if you are a CEO and you tell the truth to the market, which is that it's going to be a long-term incremental growth, Where the fundamentals are going to be satisfied.
Well, guess what?
You're going to get punished.
Your stock price is going to get punished.
You are going to face a shareholder revolt.
Your board is going to rise up in arms and they're going to fire you.
And then your career is sort of over.
Like, what are you going to do?
You're going to say, yes, I got fired from my last job because I had a shareholder and board revolt.
And they kicked me out with extreme prejudice.
Well, no one's going to hire you.
Especially if they dig in further and find out that you were fired for causing the stock price to drop by a quarter or a third or a half or more.
Well, CEOs just aren't going to do that, right?
They are just like you and me.
They're not going to shoot themselves in the foot for the sake of a fight that they cannot win.
I mean, if the stock market were different, if the stock market looked at these pump-and-dump scenarios and went, well, that's kind of wrong, I'm not going to do that, then of course CEOs would start telling the truth because they would be rewarded for it rather than punished for it.
Nobody is going to end their career, get fired in disgrace, and never be able to get another decent job for the sake of telling the truth to a bunch of people who are not going to listen to you and are just going to punish you and hire someone else who's going to lie to them.
So, I mean, that's simply the fact of the The matter when it comes to business.
So, why is the stock market like this?
Why is the stock market so messed up?
Well, I think it's important to understand what the stock market is for and then to recognize what it's not for.
The stock market is for raising capital for businesses that want to grow.
And so, if you're going to invest in a business, you really should know something about that business and its market.
Like, I think I would be fairly competent after spending 10 or so years at the higher echelons of software management.
You know, I'd be fairly confident to look at a software company and say, okay, well, do they have good change control management?
Do they have a way of controlling scope creep?
Do they overpromise?
Are they investing in their existing clients?
Are they building architecture up?
Or are they still on VB6 and Access or whatever?
I'm fairly good at being able to ask the kinds of questions that can help me determine whether it's a well-run software company or a poorly run software company.
But you ask me that for a manufacturing company, I'm really not going to have much of a clue.
So investors are those who can have some sort of capacity to evaluate a company and its prospects and its marketing potential and its management and its processes and, you know, sort of separate the wheat from the chaff and invest properly.
Now, that's time-consuming, right?
I mean, you've got to go interview these companies, you've got to figure out the market.
I mean, it's time-consuming and the investment that you put in, of course, though, tends to pay off in more stable returns and blah, blah, blah.
So, that's one type of person who's in the stock market and that person's called an investor.
And whether you delegate that to a fund manager or not, the issue is, are you looking at the fundamentals of the business and do you have an understanding of what you're investing in?
So, all well and good.
This kind of investor is in the tiny, tiny, tiny minority these days.
Let me tell you about the other type of investor.
The other type of investor is called a speculator.
Now, a speculator doesn't have much of a clue of the business that he is investing in.
He's kind of playing the numbers.
He's saying, well, the stock price usually does this after that, or, you know, I think that other people are going to want this stock based on X, Y, or Z, so I'm going to buy it.
They don't really know what they're buying.
Like if you ask most investors in internet companies in the 90s what platform those internet companies ran their software on, or what was the average age of experience of their programmers or project managers and so on, they wouldn't have a clue.
What they'd say was, yeah, online airline bookings, that seems fantastic!
I would use that!
I think other people are going to... and they just, you know, they threw their money over the wall and hoped that more money was going to be thrown back at them, but they sure as heck did not know what they were investing in.
These kind of investors are called speculators.
And, you know, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with speculation.
Of course, everybody's free to gamble as they see fit.
I mean, you know, take your money, throw it into the roulette wheel and see what comes out.
More power to you.
However, of course, in the real free market, in a truly free stock market, the speculators are pretty heavily punished.
You know, it's not called speculation to buy a Microsoft chair or a set of Microsoft chairs because they're not going to be worthless next year.
However, it is speculation to buy a stock in a small mining company that may or may not be able to find some gold or diamonds or whatever.
So the reason that speculators are discouraged is that speculation is enormously risky.
And you don't normally put more than a few percentage points of your portfolio into speculation, because it's like fun money.
It's like roulette money.
You know, you might... You know, 10 of the companies you invest in are going to go down, and maybe one of them will produce 10 or 15 times return on investment.
But you really can't make a living off speculation, because it's far too random.
And you can just get completely hosed very, very quickly.
As, of course, the people who invested in the parent company that bought my company, I'm sure, became all too aware.
So, why?
Speculators also drive stock market prices up and down wildly, right?
Because they're on innuendo, on possibility, on rumor.
They also may have inside political connections and so on to find out that FDA approval is going to a small company or some company is going to get a large tax break or an investment from the federal government or whatever.
So, speculation is not what the stock market is designed for.
Of course, you can't eliminate it and neither should you, But the problem is that if the incentives for speculation versus investment get screwed up, then so does the stock market.
So once you have a prevalence of speculators in the stock market, you also corrupt business leadership to the point where all they're looking at is short-term ticket prices rather than long-term growth.
And as I mentioned before, long-term growth strategies get heavily punished.
Short-term pillage strategies get enormously rewarded.
And of course, a CEO who's looking at either losing his job and career versus making $50 million is going to have some sort of incentive to not be upfront and long-term and strategic.
In his approach to communications with the market, right?
I mean, he's going to say, oh yeah, everything's going great.
We're going to double our profits next quarter, blah, blah, blah.
The stock price goes up.
He makes a fortune.
He's going to cook the books to match his projections.
He makes another fortune and then he can bungee out later if he wants and say, well, look, I doubled the stock price after I left.
Look, the new management screwed up the company, right?
The fact that he may have pulled out investment from things like R&D, client satisfaction, long-term growth strategies, You know, it's pretty obscured to anybody who's going to be looking at his performance down the road.
He's not going to know all of that and certainly not going to be told by the CEO.
So it looks pretty damn good if you're a CEO and you focus on pleasing the market.
You make a fortune, your company makes a fortune, and then you get out before the consequences of your short-term investment strategy take root, right?
If you don't do R&D, you don't satisfy your existing customers, you know, it's going to show up a couple of years from now, but it's not going to show up next quarter.
And, of course, a couple of years from now the CEO is gone and so he can blame the poor performance on the new CEO.
Anyway, so enough about that.
Let's talk about why the stock market has become this bizarre and this counterproductive and this non-optimal, I guess you could say, right?
Well, of course, a good mental trick or approach to looking at any of these kinds of situations is to look for the gun.
Look for the gun.
Anytime you see a counterintuitive, counterproductive, messy, oscillating, random, seemingly random, and corruption-inducing situation, you know for sure there's a gun at the bottom of it.
And let me tell you what that gun is.
In the stock market, you should only be in there if you know what you're doing.
You should only be investing if you know the company, Or you trust whoever is investing to handle your money because he or she knows the company or the market.
Now, I want you to just think about your own economic life for a moment.
How much money do you have in the stock market that you didn't choose to put there?
I'll give you some hints, right?
I'm going to make generic terms for Canadian and U.S.
financial instruments, but you can apply those as you see fit to your own particular locale.
Number one.
Social security.
Your old age pensions, called the CPP or Canada Pension Plan in Canada.
Social security in the U.S., of course.
15% of your income.
7%, I think, 7.5% from your employer, 7.5% from you.
15% of your income is taken from you and, quote, invested.
On your behalf.
Now, did you want 15% of your income to go into the stock market and be managed by people that you really don't know anything about?
Well, of course not.
Of course you wouldn't.
I mean, that would be a lunatic strategy.
Especially when the people who are managing it are political and don't even profit from a growth in your investments.
So, there's 15% of your income right there.
Now, what about your 401k plan?
What about what in Canada is called the RRSP plan?
Which is the tax-sheltered income that you're supposed to put aside for your retirement.
Well, in Canada, you can put up to $13,500 a year into this, and it's all removed from your taxable income.
So, hunky-dory, you've saved yourself, you know, whack loads of money, assuming you're in one of our gruesome tax brackets, which most Canadians are.
So there's another, what, 8-10% of your income forcibly pushed into the stock market against your will.
And there's another example of money.
So we're already at 20-25% or so of your income that is being forcibly, at gunpoint, herded into the stock market against your will.
Right?
So we're all speculators.
And hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars are being forced into the stock market where, you know, they just damn well should not be.
Let's look at another one.
If you work in a public sector, then you have another retirement plan.
And all of that money is being forced from your paycheck into the stock market against your will.
Pension plans for teachers in Canada are huge.
Tens and tens of billions of dollars.
If you are part of a union, even in the private sector, you probably have another kind of plan for your retirement or whatever.
Everybody loves these retirement plans because, like the politicians and the lawmakers, love retirement plans because, you know, it's so far off the benefits that they can screw you for decades.
And, you know, you won't really pick up on it until you try to actually collect your check at the end of your life, or near the end of your life.
So there's another 5, 6, 7 percent of your income that's being forcibly put into the stock market because, you know, you don't have an option to not be part of these particular retirement plans or plans of that kind.
I'll give you another example.
Unemployment insurance.
Or in Canada, of course, it's called employment insurance because, you know, if they change the name, they've changed the program.
Here's another enormous amount.
I think it's four or five percent of our income here that's taken for employment insurance, which is also invested in the stock market.
And there's another example of money that is put into the stock market against your will, which if you don't give it to them, you're thrown in jail.
Here's another example.
In Canada, I don't know how it is in the US, there are income trusts which you can put in.
They have to be invested in the stock market and you get a certain amount of tax deductions and so on.
There's registered educational savings plans which are also forced you to put money into the stock market or give it up at the point of a gun through taxation.
I mean, these are just the ones off the top of my head.
I bet you there are hundreds more.
And what they do is they march your money at gunpoint into the stock market against your will.
And, of course, you don't have the time to manage all of these different investments.
And you don't have the power to, for the most part, even if you could.
You can't tell the government how to invest your old-age pensions.
I mean, it's impossible.
So, you know, why?
Why does the government want all this money in the stock market?
Well, because it gives the government power.
Of course, that's why the government does anything, right?
I mean, I'm not saying they sit there with a whiteboard saying, ah, here's how we're going to get power, and they stroke their pencil-thin mustaches or anything.
It's nothing like that.
It's just natural, you know?
Like, children can be bullies because people have an instinct for how to expand their power and how to Humiliate others and you know and if they grow up as bullies or thwarted bullies Then they become politicians and they just they have an instinct about the best way to expand the power that they they have and so the way that they do it is both in the long term it corrupts capitalism and gives them the the the power or the legitimacy to regulate industries right is if you start to corrupt a
People's decision-making processes in business then you get horrible results like Enron and Worldcom and you know the whole bubble and burst of the internet stock booms and so on.
And so the government says well you know we have to come in and regulate because it oscillates so wildly and blah blah blah.
But of course the reason that it's oscillating so wildly is quite simple.
There are hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars that are being forced into the stock market that are overcharging it.
So you have all of this money sloshing back and forth in the stock market looking for Tiny variations in returns and share prices and promises.
Nobody's in it for the long term because in the long term it's absolutely impossible that the stock market can produce enough returns to satisfy the amount of money that's sloshing around looking for investment.
So whenever you try to invest too much, you know, you're just not going to get a return.
So you're going to look for pump and dumps.
You're going to look to raise the price of a stock and dump it to someone else.
Because it's actually a negative net-sum game.
The money is going to decline, and so all of that is occurring, and that's going to corrupt the entire process of the stock market, right?
Everybody's looking for short-term gains.
There's hundreds of billions of dollars sloshing around this overcharged stock market, looking for minor discrepancies, and so the whole process has been corrupted.
Oh, and before I forget, there's one other way in which your income is also charged into the stock market.
This is perhaps the biggest one, which is, of course, the national debt, right?
I mean, the government borrows money, spends it on this, that, or the other, which completely distorts the economy.
And, of course, in the future you're going to have to pay all this money back to the institutional investors who lend to the government, all the people who buy stocks and bonds.
The bonds that the government sells are also instruments which are going to require Investment, right?
I mean, if you buy bonds in a school board, they actually have to invest that money.
And so everybody who's buying savings bonds or whatever, federally backed or state backed instruments, you know, they're also forcing money into the stock market.
So this is another way in which the stock market is corrupted.
So, you know, the other reason that politicians want money to go into the stock market is because, you know, they get a lot of pressure To get money into the stock market from, you know, people in the stock market, right?
I mean, Goldman Sachs and all these other major trading companies, large industrial concerns, they all are the upper echelons of the financial elite.
All want money going into the stock market because, well, guess what?
That's their job, which is to make money off the stock market.
And most people, you know, we're raising our kids, we're working our jobs, we're doing this, that, and the other.
We're not tracking what's going on in the stock market from a macro level, so we're at a complete disadvantage and ripe for fleecing.
The moment that this stuff gets jammed into the stock market, the moment that all our money gets stuck there, it is now open to the manipulation from the financial elites whose full-time job it is to understand the stock market and to profit from it.
And so what happens?
Well, the politicians get an enormous amount of pressure to rope all this money and put it into the stock market.
There is an enormous amount of money that can be made from having an overcharged stock market, of course.
I mean, if you have an overcharged stock market, the billions of dollars that can change hands through this pump-and-dump scenario, I mean, it's absolutely staggering how much money gets transferred because of this corruption within the stock market, because of hurting everybody's money into the stock market, far more than can be reasonably absorbed by the stock market.
You know, it all becomes a zero-sum or negative-sum financial transaction game.
Where those who are in the know are basically taking money in small increments from a wide variety of people who aren't in the know and who have no choice about investing.
So this is where political fortunes are made, of course.
And, you know, of course it's completely immoral, absolutely wrong, to force people at gunpoint to put their money into the stock market because it is not designed for this kind of speculation.
And what happens is the negative punishment that speculation normally draws, right?
You speculate, you lose a lot of money, doesn't really occur as much because you're constantly getting new money coming into the stock market that's being forced to go there.
So losses which come from this kind of problematic investment tend to get wiped, like they're just not as big a deal, plus you've got lots of incentives wherein, you know, you can transfer stock losses through tax incentives into, you know, deducting taxes against future capital gains and all that kind of stuff.
And I haven't even gone into that, how the system for the stock market transactions and taxes and profits and loss is entirely skewed to benefit those who play the stock market, right?
I mean, if I found a business and pour a lot of money into it and lose that money, well, I can't really, you know, I don't get all of that money taken off my taxes the next time I get a job.
But if you're in the stock market, you get all of these capital losses translated into tax deductions on capital gains down the road.
That's, you know, And of course, this is all as you would expect it to be, given that, you know, financial instruments of this kind are very complicated and difficult to understand, and highly profitable for those in the know.
So naturally, you would expect that those who are not in the know are going to get fleeced, and those who are in the know are going to make an absolute fortune.
And the way that they're going to do this is to use the violent power of the government to force people into making decisions that they wouldn't, well, not making decisions, to force people into doing what they wouldn't normally do, i.e.
throwing a quarter or thirty or forty percent of their income into the stock market against their will.
And then having all of the profits from that accrue to a small percentage of the population.
I mean, this is, basically, it's mercantilism all over again with financial instruments taking the places of, you know, East Asian spices or, you know, the trade routes that were bought and sold in England in the 18th and 19th centuries and, of course, all over the world.
This is a mercantilist system wherein the small number of financial elites, you know, are in bed with the government And the government is passing legislation that both enriches and enslaves that financial elite, because now they're enslaved to the whim of the government, right?
The financial elite then, of course, will give an enormous amount of campaign contributions to those who promise to maintain and exacerbate the system.
The challenge of explaining the negative consequences of this system to the uninitiated is prodigious.
I mean, it's very hard.
To sit down and explain to somebody who doesn't really understand anything about the stock market exactly how this is hurting him.
And to what degree is it hurting him?
Well, $10,000 a year, $12,000 a year, $8,000 a year.
To what degree can he change it?
Well, nothing.
I mean, you can't change it, right?
I mean, the mismatch of incentives, as we all know, is so extreme for this kind of legal corruption that there's simply no way to match the incentives to the rewards.
If I go and fight this tooth and nail, I may stand to gain $8,000 a year out of it.
However, the people who I am fighting are all gaining hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars a year from having the system, this coercive system, stay the way that it is.
And it's going to cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To fight this, and there's going to be no incentive for any judge to rock the boat in this area.
So, I mean, it's like farm subsidies or whatever, right?
I mean, there's no incentive to fight it.
There's a negative incentive to fight it because you have to pay in terms of time and money and frustration.
It's going to take you 10 years or whatever, right?
So there's a huge negative incentive to fight it.
And there's a massive positive incentive to maintain it, which is that the financial elites are making hundreds of billions of dollars a year from, you know, forcing everyone at gunpoint to stick their money or, you know, lobbying the government to do it.
And the government, of course, gains an enormous amount of power.
It gains enormous influence over the financial elites.
So they can say, you've got to do X, Y, or Z, or we're going to, by God, get rid of your capital gains entitlements, in which case they'll all stand in line.
And also the government gains power to regulate.
It gains legitimacy for itself because it can say, look how crazy capitalism is.
The stock market is insane.
Of course, we need to have, you know, Sarbanes-Oxley and we need to have regulations to make sure that people aren't cooking the books.
And we have to absolutely make sure that, you know, the market is not going to stay crazy because look at it.
It just goes up and down.
People's savings get wiped out.
People's retirements get wiped out.
So, of course, we need the government.
There's a large number of reasons why this kind of system tends to stay in place.
But I guess the most important thing to get out of this is that there's nothing wrong with the stock market at all.
The problem, as it always is with these kinds of situations, is the fact that an enormous amount of violence is being directed at people, which is forcing them to take their money or have their money taken from them and put into the stock market, which completely corrupts the essential nature of capitalism, which is that you really are going to get heavily rewarded for long-term strategic
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