👉Is The Stock Market just a Casino for Rich People ?

👉Is The Stock Market just a Casino for Rich People ? The stock markets are no longer an indicator of national economic prosperity. They started to become uncoupled in the 1980s under Reagan, and today they aren't linked to economic health at all. Today they are purely an indicator of how successfully the rich are stealing what little the rest of us have. The best indicators of economic health today are: 1) the minimum wage. 2) the combined unemployment rate (which includes everyone who would work more if they could but don't have the opportunity). 3) the ratio of independent contractors to employees. and 4) the ratio of rent to income. When the first indicator is rising, and the other three are dropping, that means the nation's economic health is improving. Everything in the US is over-valued and over-hyped. Has been for a long time. So people better wake up. The US market is kept afloat by trillions of QE money. When the bubble bursts, it is going to be spectacular. The Fed has made it clear they are not going to let the market decline. They are buying the bad debt and equities and pumping in money. This is not a mystery. It's a no-lose bet the stock market isn't the economy. The stock market is just a game for the rich to enrich themselves further. There are more measures of a country's and company's health than the stock market or interest rates. There are OECD indicators. There are literacy measures. There is the minimum wage and, although this country doesn't recognize it, the broadness of the social safety net. Public health is another measure. And the gap between the poor and the wealthy. Large institutional investors who drive the market have nowhere else left to go. The yield on a 10-year Treasury note closed at .70 percent today. So why not roll the dice on stocks? Welcome back to The Atlantis Report. You are here for your daily dose of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Please take a second to hit the like button, hit the subscribe button, and don't forget to also hit the notification bell. Stocks help the rich get richer. Most of us are not involved. So, it is important to the rich, the powerful, and our leaders. The pandemic has loosened the bolts on the machine. The protests are real and formidable as well. It is a movement. The people, the used and abused people are tired and desperate. We've created this reckoning (self-government/democracy remember). We the People, are the cause. Most Americans seem ready for change, maybe great change. But, the billionaires, the multi-millionaires, are sitting pretty and aren't too keen on change. Who will win the great match? Who is up to it? What are people for? Today we are witnessing literal casino capitalism, the final stage where irrational insanity and outright gambling precede a total collapse. A failed state, with a largely uneducated public, in a country hollowed out by the greed of a tiny elite. America today and tomorrow. We are not even to be pitied, after all the damage we’ve done since the 1950s. Stick a fork in it and turn it over; it’s done. In essence, the Federal government transferred $2T to the private sector in the form of tax cuts. That money was used by businesses to buy back stock and by wealthy investors to buy stock. This policy is driven by the notion that those who control capital are job creators. They're obviously not. Poor people spend money; rich people accumulate more. The way out of the current predicament is for the US to retrieve all or part of its $2T outlay and redirect those funds to an innovative jobs program with infrastructure enhancement at its core. I think the top 10% of Americans own over 80% of stocks. It's their baby. Pensions are woefully underfunded, and not many people get those these days. Businesses have also cut back on 401k's. America is marching towards oligarchy, basically since Reagan's trickle down economics and his assault on worker unions. Remember David Stockman, chairman of Reagan's Office of Budget and Management? He said when he was meeting with industry leaders to discuss policy, they were crazy about getting all they could. His infamous quote, 'The pigs were really at the feeders.' People are in the streets because the pandemic has shown us how unequal we are and how tenuous life is for millions. The reckoning is here due to our greed and inequality. Greed is our virus, and only compassion, love, equality, good citizenship, and high quality of life for all of us is the antidote. The stock market is only for rich people. It's legalized gambling to boot. Most of us are not involved. Most of the population is very close to bankruptcy. A healthy society is not filled with payday loan vendors and a minimum wage that no one can live on. In the US, the rich have gotten richer due to a vast transfer of wealth from the middle class that has been enabled over the past 40 years by deregulating business, eliminating protections for ordinary Americans, defunding government programs that help people get ahead, and taking advantage of the massive economic shocks caused by unregulated capitalism to buy up our assets. We're rapidly approaching a day when the average American won't own any assets at all. Even mobile home parks are being bought up by investors. The stock market can't function without some people being losers. It makes no sense at all to base the stability of your country on a system that runs hot and crashes over and over again, crushing some people like bugs and vastly enriching others. Illiquidity is not the problem, thanks to the Fed. Part of the problem was the Fed juicing up the system. The stock market is full of insanity to be sure. It is a place rife with emotion, fear and greed, and of course, speculation. The run-up in prices in 2020 was due to corporate share buybacks. Clearly, the corporations did not read the fine print on the corporate tax cut, saying that the cut would lead to more business investment and higher wages. So it is interesting that this is a retail bubble this time. These suckers will lose the money they foolishly plowed into Hertz. Hertz executives can rejoice, and no one is crying for the losers. It’s all about Financial Engineering. When a company buys back its own shares, it pays cash for the shares. But the shares usually get canceled and are gone. As far as the company is concerned, the cash is gone too; someone else has it now. And stockholder equity – the difference between assets and liabilities, reflecting the company’s equity capital – drops by that amount. Funded with debt: Share buybacks totaled nearly $5 trillion since 2012. Over the same period, corporate debt soared by $4.5 trillion. We use a debt based monetary system, which means that in order to increase the money in the economy, you have to increase the debt. If you decrease the debt, you will, at the same time, decrease the money in the system because it is the debt that we use as money. Money created when the commercial banks give out a loan because we use that credit as money. The interest on the loans is what is draining the economy because that interest was never created when the bank gave out the loan. That is why the size of the total debt has to be bigger and bigger because more money/ debt has to be created in order to pay the existing interest on the old debt. That ignores the fact that all of these companies are weakening themselves drastically, so that (if as I predict, the congress will not pass a sufficiently gigantic bailout to rescue the tens of thousands of businesses and reportedly, at least 40 million needy Americans), a huge number will become legally insolvent. Many will close and cause a massive loss of jobs. Of course, investors might find another place in which to put their cash. That is always the case, but you are ignoring the manipulation that is occurring through these share buybacks: by getting into debt and giving away necessary cash, the stock price of many, many companies has been inflated to ranges that any third-year undergraduate student of finance should be able to figure out are insane. Even the fake PE ratios cannot support most companies’ valuations. Most real PE ratios (when they ever come out, if ever) of large companies would show their prices to be insane. Thus, it would be good for investors to invest in more competently run companies. However, where? I am sufficiently familiar with the preparation of current financial statements post-Enron that I no longer believe in most of them. Any company that is not obviously booming might have hidden, fundamental weaknesses. Despite my knowledge and experience, I see only a few absolutely sure investment opportunities for an investor that cannot just take over companies, like Mr. Buffett. Holding dollars now means you are giving money away because the banksters’ Federal Reserve is effectively robbing all savers through the oncoming inflation that will follow the recession/depression. The US faces such oncoming demographic and bankster-corruption-caused cliffs that few companies are clearly, absolutely safe. Diversification must be used, with the acceptance that some investments will not be recoverable. I wonder if the coming (or already extant AI?). AIs will be able to catch the massive, Enron-types of financial fraud ongoing from the publicly available information? Alphazero’s reputed abilities mean that we are at the very least climbing nearer the human-level intelligence summit and computer processing power doubles rapidly every year or so. I am actually surprised (and a little spooked) that nothing much is being discussed in the media about an AI that taught itself games by playing them. Finance, logistics, military strategy, and even litigation consist of the games-like analysis of positions and moves, so the potential of this AI with supporting narrow AIs (and quantum computer software) performing more specific functions is already amazing. It will be like having two (or a dozen) Gen. Douglas MacArthurs in a box in terms of military planning. Maybe, before the ultimately-likely obliteration that an AI with super intelligence will cause, as Musk warned, the lower level AIs might rescue us from many current dilemmas. I sure wish that there was some AI-created cure possible for the Wall Streeters’/banksters’ toxic, absolute, consuming greed: complete asset forfeiture for all corporate officers, corporate lawyers, and corporate-control-group-members whose corporations became legally insolvent or are convicted of fraud or misconduct might do the trick. This was The Atlantis Report. Please Like. Share. Leave me a comment. Subscribe. And please take some time to subscribe to my backup channels; I do upload videos there too. You'll find the links in the description box. You will also find a PayPal link if you want to make a donation. Thank you wholeheartedly to all those of you who have already donated. Stay safe and healthy friends! The Financial Armageddon Economic Collapse Blog tracks trends and forecasts , futurists , visionaries , free investigative journalists , researchers , Whistelblowers , truthers and many more