ETA!!!
Sorry to offend so many people with this OLD meme in a MEME community!
Feel free to post more recent content!
this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2025
474 points (91.1% liked)
Political Memes
9362 readers
2354 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The stock market is not economic security or mobility, housing security, quality of life or education, standard of living ... or everything else that actually matters to 99% of the human population.
The stock market isn't even "the economy". It's literally just an indicator of how much more wealthy the wealthiest have grown over a period of time.
I'm no economist, but isn't the stock market more an indicator of what the wealthy think will happen in the near future?
The stock market is just a way for people with more money to slowly take money away from people with less money, while the people with less money feel like they have a chance of winning. For poor people it is basically gambling, and for rich people it is basically owning the casino.
There are so many built-in structures to the way it operates to favour the flow of money to larger holders over time.
Also it's only slow for the rich people, for the poor people it can happen in an instant.
A stock price isn't "money". It is, literally, a price tag. The price of a stock going up does not take actual money out of anyone's wallet.
If my $5 baseball card becomes worth $100 as time passes while I continue to possess it, do you seriously believe I've now done the equivalent of stealing $95?
Your baseball card became worth more because more of them got lost or destroyed over time so it got more rare. So the increase in value came from all the people that lost their 5 dollar card. And also partially from inflation.
Completely different from the stock market.
The money from the stock market comes primarily from other investors. You may not be directly taking it from them, but there are only a few layers of abstraction between them putting money into a stock that went down and you taking money out of a stock that went up.
But the main advantage rich people have in the stock market is less latency in their trades and more weight to swing around. Not to mention being much more likely to have insider info, but even without actually cheating they have quite a few advantages that tip it in their favour.
Assumption. That can happen because the athlete has a very good season, or even becomes famous/infamous for an unrelated reason.
In other words, you're assuming it's because supply went down, but it can also be that demand went up. Or a combination.
But that's beside the point, which is that its value changing has zero impact on what's in others' wallets. Because it's a price tag. Not an amount of actual money.
But, once the valuation is realized.... then it has done all the things I said. So yes, if you only ever buy stocks and never sell them, you have never gained money that came from somewhere else... but you also haven't become rich then.
Which it hasn't, in the case I'm referring to, where it's being claimed that net worth increases = equivalent decreases in others' cash reserves.
The notion that the world's wealth is zero sum (which is required to believe the foolishness above), when it's exceedingly obvious that new wealth is created constantly, is a display of blatant ignorance of basic economics.
What case are you referring to? The initial comment was on how the stock market transfers wealth from poor people to rich people over time. There was no individual referred case.
While new wealth is also theoretically created, that doesn't change the fact that it is also coming from people that don't do well on the stock market, which is the vast majority numerically. It very much is just gambling for them, against the "house".
Yes. And it doesn't.
If there was no stock market, poor people wouldn't be any less poor. There was literally a lot more poverty before stock markets existed.
I don't know if you have to think that way because you want to feel better about something you do or if you have been taught it by someone... You are looking at something 2-dimensionally and assuming you have the full idea of it. By constraining yourself to only the simple concept of it and not what it all touches on, you are deluding yourself to the full effect it has.