Ive often seen individuals on the left talking about how billionares shouldnt exist etc., but when probed on how that could be accomplished the answer is usually just taxes or guillotines. I dont think either is great.
What if instead, corporations were made to be unable to be sold or owned. Initially theyre made to default to popular election for their board, and after that they can set up a charter or adopt a standard one, ratified by majority vote of their employees.
Bank collapse would probably follow, how could that be remedied? Maybe match the banks invalidated stocks with bonds?
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A return to pure value investing would be incredible harm reduction about, I dunno, sixty years ago. Nowadays the derivatives market is so much larger than the actual market that any attempt to unwind it might literally collapse the entire global economy
At least some of that is tax rates. A few tweaks to unrealized income and losses, capital gains and losses, treatment of dividends, and we can step back from the brink of “financial engineering” and get back to using the profit motive for actual engineering. Basically repeal most of the tax changes since Reagan
Whisper of a dream
The stock market shouldn’t exist. Fight me.
Fight you?
Brother, I’ve come to join you.
Poor people are poor just because they don’t know how to participate in the stock market. Fight me.
I fully agree!
However, participation requirements for winning include:
- Knowledge (obviously)
- Having a lot of money in the first place
- Having power to influence the rules and / or market
Both point 2 and 3 are false. You have examples for both in the current US affairs. Please elaborate if you know something that the rest of us doesn’t.
Holy crap your effing president is running pump and dump schemes and a lot of politicians made wins on stocks that they Coincidentally sold or bought with the right timing.
Do I need to explain that?
That is blatant misuse of power and conflict of interest.
That’s corruption, and it’s totally something else, but nevertheless there might be others who had no idea, but had the stock at the right moment, and sold as it was high. So, even in cases where the powerful play, the small ones, if lucky, could massively win.
On the other hand, you had the worlds wealthiest man, being second hand to the most powerful man on the planet, and he lost billions. So… I wouldn’t call those that much significant. I bet there are tons of smaller examples where CEO’s manipulate the stock of their own company that fly under the radar. But overall, in general, especially if you invest into ETFs (groups of stocks) you will barely notice anything and life goes on as usual. And the usual is 6-8% win per year on average.
That’s fine, let’s just disagree.
My point besides the corruption would be a massively rigged system. Yes, you can have wins. But that does not make it better or even - and that was the point before - people who don’t use it incapable to do so.
They might also want to stay clear from it, wisely.
Could be, but in the end, no risk no reward. People who do risk, are the ones who get rewarded.
where is the line between croud funding and a stock?
Why don’t you think taxing the super rich is great?
answered this one here : https://lemmy.world/comment/17993835
Why not instead have public and/or worker ownership of stocks, as the Meidner plan proposed, or in the form of a Social Wealth Fund as Matt Bruenig at the People’s Policy Project has suggested? This give people both democratic control and socializes the profits. As long as we have corporations, having them owned either by the public or by their workers (in the form of cooperatives) seems like the way to go.
I think the people that built a company are better qualified to elect their ceo than the bulk populus. Gotta be democratically elected by workers imo, though a simple majority isnt always the best way.
I don’t get how you can think Taxes aren’t the answer but removing stocks are. Billionaires exist because they have a lot of money in some form and are able to reinvest that money to get more money. If you remove stocks, they will find another way to have a lot of money, whether that’s owning a lot of business, buying up properties etc. Start applying a sort of wealth tax, disallow financial influence in election (putting actual limits on spending), fix the loophole for passing on wealth to children with little to no tax, etc. There really isn’t a simple solution, but a wide range of changes that need to be done in my opinion.
Well, if you want to tax billionares out of existance u need a wealth tax, aka unrealized gains.
taxing unrealized gains is just going to force individuals to sell their business to liquidate the cash to pay their taxes. Institutional traders will buy them up, so youre universally taking control out of the hands of people and giving it to banks and hedgefunds, which will just end up owning eachother.
I dont think any billionares exist that made their money in some other way than selling stocks in a business they acquired at a lower value, aside from inheritance or divorce.
Maybe you do implement a wealth tax anyway though, but you do it after abolishing stocks, just to catch the loopholes.
You’re overthining. There aren’t enough billionaires for abstracts like this. Just create specific teams fir evaluating each individual billionaire’s due.
Well that would eliminate the whole point of corporations, which is to make it easy to raise money.
Let’s start with an understanding of why corporations suck in the first place. The root of all good and evil in a corporation is limited lability. This allows investors to not have to worry that they’re going to lose more than their investment, so they don’t need to think too hard before putting their money in some company they just heard of. This is great for investors and for the corporation.
But this comes with a cost to everyone else. There’s the direct cost that if the corporation ends up owing people money through excessive debt, negligence, or illegal activities, they can declare bankruptcy and the investors don’t have to worry any paying for those (other than their losses on the stock). But I suspect the more pernicious effect is that the investors’ lack of concern over their investment as anything but a vehicle of profit basically leads them to pick sociopathic CEOs and demand profit maximizing behavior at the cost of social good and even long term stability. And since all this sociopathic activity is really great at amassing money, it’s kind of a big power boost for sociopathy overall.
However, the ease of investing can be a good thing for society too - basically it allows a lot of people to retire at some point, and allows for rapid funding of new ideas. So is there a way to get corporations back under control without throwing out the baby? I tend to think we should tax corporations higher if nothing else, as it is we do the opposite thanks to Trump’s last tax cut plan.
I dont think taxing them will accomplish much. its also trivial for corporations to evade taxes, and all of the big ones do.
I think the ease of raising money is part of the problem. Loads of tech companies way over-raise, and develop into bloated cancerous messes that have no way of ever realizing the growth that would have to exist to warrant the investment theyve been given.
In the first place, the only way their investors even expect make anything back would be by reselling the stock, making it a ponzi asset.
The entire system is just propped up by peoples 401ks being funneled to institutional investors. Its inherently unstable.
Make social security good enough that middle class citizens dont need to invest, and the overinflated value of stocks plummets back to earth.
I still think capitalism is a useful tool. But by are we letting it use us rather than the other way around?
Government was arguably created to establish a market, needed for any economic system to work. You need consistent legal structure, money, a way to do business.
But our failure is government getting owned by the market rather than shaping it for the good of their constituents. Let capitalism be our tool in a market that factors in externalities, fairness and that rewards work.combine that with a progressive tax system like what we claim, and things are looking up, with what seems like minor changes.
- why does the market fail to account for environmental destruction in the cost of doing business?
- why is the market based on a legal structure that exploit individuals?
- why do the richest people have the lowest effective tax rate?
Upvote for blue-sky thinking.
The stock market has been manipulated to the point where there is very little understanding of value anymore. We need a better way otherwise the “Pelosiism” will continue to drive down value and drive up prices. The only action available to us, in order to regain trust, is transparency. If it ain’t transparent, someone is diverting too much money somewhere along the line.
How about no financial products, period. No loans, no mortgage, only rent-to-own or rent. Obfuscating financial products into more complex combined financial products is half of the economy crashes. Obfuscate the numbers, steal, grab, pillage while no one can understand what the frickel you are doing and BAM: profit on the backs of normies who are tOo dumb to understand what a margin call is or why CDO’s are here to violate you. All financial products are a scam waiting in ambush, waiting for another bank-bro to think of a way they can leach from society without giving anything back.
I would very much like to see this happen.
Our beef supply would vanish overnight
WHERE DID THE COWS GO
I’ve got a better idea: Make stockholders criminally liable and eligible for prison/execution for the crimes committed by the companies they invest in.
Oh, PharmaCorp knowingly put a medication in to production that causes baby’s brains to catch fire? Every single investor in PharmaCorp is gonna serve three consecutive life sentences in Rapesburg-Asspain penitentiary.
Wipe out a few generations of the upper class by getting a couple mass first degree murder convictions to stick and the problem will sort itself out.
Mutual funds…you probably own some and definitely someone you know also has mutual funds that probably own those stocks too…but I like the thought and see potential.
I don’t, I have no stock portfolio at all. You’re probably right there’s a lot of bullshit that goes on in the financial world that I would put a pretty swift end to. Hell, “money market” bank accounts and such are probably somehow attached to the stock market.
If I understand correctly, a mutual fund is basically a bunch of people invest in a bunch of stocks managed by a professional stock guesser such that it’s almost certainly going to do at least kind of okay. Yeah I’d either outright end that practice or heap a LOT of liability on the stock guesser and a bit on the members.
You invested in a mutual fund, and one of the 60 stocks in the portfolio was Locktheon, and Locktheon just released a chemical weapon killing an entire small town? Your stock broker is now a slave of the state and will die in the mines, you and everyone else who is a member of that mutual fund owe 1000 hours community service each. We’re going to have a highway system so clean you can eat off it.
You’d need to rollback the last 70 years of pensions being replaced by 401k plans and/or limit responsibility to the brokers. If you hire a licensed plumber that ends up flooding your neighbor’s place, the plumber is the one getting sued.
It would probably also be good to restructure retirement incentives away from the stock market, but that’s not going to happen overnight either.
Frankly there are probably a lot of people who need to see their retirements go away and they need to spend their golden years in the mines. They need to have their elderly assholes penised apart for voting for this shit for decades.
I read through almost the whole thing wondering how it would connect to “socks”. Is he a shill for “big footwear”?
You need a way to invest in companies, especially for any to grow, and you need to motivate people. A central economy might budget tax revenue, typically on a multi-year plan, but it tends not to be responsive to real world messiness nor motivating. Capitalism means anyone can invest in a company, getting partial ownership and partial benefit from gains and responding quickly to the whims of the market. People are motivated by profit. Are you proposing a third way?
Idk, man. I paid my rent last year with some stocks i cashed out.
I’d recommend just researching companies to invest in for like 10 years, and then research information on ETFs to help your money grow with the market. I’m basically poor and the stocks i invested in helped when i needed it, and i am definitely going to invest again.
But I wouldn’t say get rid of the stock market. Just do some research, and only invest what you’re willing to not keep in a savings account for a rainy day.
