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The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

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Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#581

Post by insane_dreamer »

dredmorbius wrote: post #576
insane_dreamer wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s incorrect. It had a lot to do with it because it represented the fact that Europe’s governments had little to no wealth after WW2 while the US had it all (thus economic and military dominance).

And wealth, as Mr. Smith says, is "the produce and labour of the nation", which is to say, economic activity, as noted in my GP comment.

True, but gold is (and especially was) a store of wealth, into which "produce and labor of the nation" had been converted over time by European nations

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#582

Post by HDThoreaun »

pydry wrote: post #516
HDThoreaun wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont think anyone would care if some people just had huge piles of money in the bank. Its what they do with the money that causes problems. That's income.

They use it to purchase assets which you need. This is a large component of the war on affordable housing.

This countries lack of affordable housing is due to NIMBYs pulling the ladder up after themselves. We could build enough housing for all the short term rentals and second homes people want if it was legal. Rich people owning houses isnt a problem unless theyre leaving them vacant en masse which by and large is not happening.

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#583

Post by ken47 »

phkx wrote: post #421
ken47 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying that the ultra-wealthy have the right to be tyrants, but "peasants" of today's age have a quality of life that is orders of magnitudes better than peasants in the feudal age. This simple truth seems to get lost so easily when talking about inequality in a vacuum.

Then we might have reached the point to discuss whether it’s enough to lift the worst-off to some minimum where they can survive or whether we’re in a position now to also enable participation on broad scale. Right now it looks like wealth is self-enforcing. Across certain thresholds, you can get an expert or have the network to help with your taxes, legal issues, investment strategy and so on. Maybe you even inherit…

That is in the hands of the ultra-wealthy class. What is the goal of enabling people to cross these thresholds? Who does it benefit?

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#584

Post by robocat »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #556
robocat wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech stocks are the market now. If you bought Nasdaq before, at peak or after dotcom bust, then you had to wait 15 years to "break even". If you bet against tech stocks (e.g. buy S&P500) then you're down. It is historically risky to bet against the US stock market. https://infogram.com/all-recessions-1h7v4pw0g7jxj6k

It's not risky to stay on the sidelines when the market is so overvalued. This is what Warren Buffet is doing. Regardless of what you think of him, he is more sophisticated than we are. Hindsight is 20/20. The market also drops every 5-10 years by 30-50%. If you take a 50% loss even once, your money has to work way harder just to get you back to where you were before. I mean, you need to double your money to recover…

Perhaps listen to Buffett and Charlie saying they didn't time markets: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=secMNCDsxBc ...

Spelling his name wrong will generally bias people against your financial opinions.

> I mean, you need to double your money to recover from a 50% downfall

Nonsensical argument if you already doubled your money by being in the market for a long time - which appears to be especially true for tech stocks. Buffett talks about "time in the market".

Timing the market is often regarded as gambling: maybe because the idea is so alluring.

Disclaimer: I like trying to time the market, even though I believe the experts that say I shouldn't. Sold all crypto related investments about a month ago (not just timing, also opinion from looking at how crypto is used while I was travelling in Argentina, and other reasons). I believe any investment should have multiple good reasons, and can maybe have one or two poor reasons too!!!

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#585

Post by dredmorbius »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #581
dredmorbius wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And wealth, as Mr. Smith says, is "the produce and labour of the nation", which is to say, economic activity, as noted in my GP comment.

True, but gold is (and especially was) a store of wealth, into which "produce and labor of the nation" had been converted over time by European nations

No, it is not.

Gold is, and has been, an exchange medium, in which national finances have been transacted, and a durable representation of wealth. It's useful in addressing balance-of-trade relations between state.

But the overwhelming wealth of states is in their internal and external production and international trade of goods and services.

Colonial-era Spain imported gold in vast quantities from the Americas, which did it little good as that didn't represent wealth but rather exchange capacity, and did little but bid up prices whilst reducing (in similar mechanisms to Dutch Disease and the Resource Curse) the real economic potential of the country (why raise grapes, cattle or other goods when you could get in on the gold exim trade instead)? Gold bankrupted Spain, ironically enough.

Britain's colonial trade focused far more on goods: spice, cotton, sugar, tea, grain, wool, lumber, saltpetre, slaves, and the like. Those are both directly useful and contribute to infrastructure. Two things Spains gold utterly failed to do.

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#586

Post by wakawaka28 »

robocat wrote: post #584
wakawaka28 wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not risky to stay on the sidelines when the market is so overvalued. This is what Warren Buffet is doing. Regardless of what you think of him, he is more sophisticated than we are. Hindsight is 20/20. The market also drops every 5-10 years by 30-50%. If you take a 50% loss even once, your money has to work way harder just to get you back to where you were before. I mean, you need to double your money to recover…

Perhaps listen to Buffett and Charlie saying they didn't time markets: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=secMNCDsxBc ... Spelling his name wrong will generally bias people against your financial opinions. > I mean, you need to double your money to recover from a 50% downfall Nonsensical argument if you already doubled your money by being in the market for a long time - which appears to be especially true for tech stocks.…

I don't think it's impossible to time markets. But it is really hard to do. If you think buying something overpriced in a bubble is worth the risk, I would argue it is you who is timing the market. Either you think you can pull out fast enough (a MUCH harder timing problem than figuring out when to get in), or else you think that the market will never get wise to the bad value.

>Spelling his name wrong will generally bias people against your financial opinions.

Yeah let me worry about that as I type it on a phone with an unruly keyboard lol.

>Perhaps listen to Buffett and Charlie saying they didn't time markets

Where did I say you should time it? I just said, don't invest in things that are obviously overvalued. Buffett is having trouble finding anything that isn't overvalued, so his cash stockpile is growing. You can view that as timing the market or whatever, but the bottom line is that buying overvalued stuff is a guaranteed loser. And when prices come down, you need to have money available to buy anything that is at a reasonable price. Of course inflation makes it difficult to figure if prices are actually good or not, and makes it harder to preserve value while waiting for a good buy. But it's a lot safer to try to do that in general.

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#587

Post by mlrtime »

mandmandam wrote: post #543
mlrtime wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thread topic is inequality doesn't matter as much as lifting QOL for all income levels. The delta isn't important.

Quality of life is about to take a very hard hit, directly because of the level of inequality [0]. You can't separate these things and expect the world to make sense. When the ultra-wealthy capture too much of the levers of power, and strip-mine all our potential just to get a bit more in a bid for total control, quality of life for humanity suffers. We've been suffering for it, as I explained above, and we're going…

You make a lot of claims about the future, but you are guessing. We have no idea. All I hear is fear mongering and hate against people with more than they have.

Fwiw, I think there is a upper bound where inequality starts hurting the average (we aren't near it) however all the solutions I hear are worse than doing nothing. The government forcing equality by taking from one to give to another will never work. It's been tried and it fails horribly.

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#588

Post by pydry »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #582
pydry wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They use it to purchase assets which you need. This is a large component of the war on affordable housing.

This countries lack of affordable housing is due to NIMBYs pulling the ladder up after themselves. We could build enough housing for all the short term rentals and second homes people want if it was legal. Rich people owning houses isnt a problem unless theyre leaving them vacant en masse which by and large is not happening.

It's the other way around. If you think about it it's a little ridiculous to think that the entire world had a NIMBY crisis all at the same time.

Vacant en masse is happening a fair bit there are even some near where i live.

Mostly it's more people renting though.

The war on affordable housing is all around.

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#589

Post by nindalf »

awei wrote: post #143
nindalf wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we all agree to flag comments that outsource their thinking to LLMs?

I used grok deepsearch for sure not to search google myself and I wanted to cite my source

LLMs are not a source, because they hallucinate. You need to cite a source that doesn't lie habitually.

Regardless, you're embarrassing yourself. The mere fact that you'd publicly admit to giving Elon Musk money lowers my estimate of you substantially.

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#590

Post by Gasp0de »

apexalpha wrote: post #509
Gasp0de wrote: post #108

I was very surprised by the holiday budget. Less than 2500$ for 80% of the population? Does that mean that no one from these 80% stays in a Hotel or AirBnB for longer than a week with their family? No one travels overseas, or if so, only every 5 years or so? 2000$ is what you can easily spend on plane tickets for a family of 4.

Crazy that you literally have no clue whatsoever how 80% of your country lives and has lived for the all your life.

It's probably because it's not my country
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