this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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The whole stock market system is parasitic.
The current system is because it has incentives for short term profiteering over steady long term profits.
There could be tax reforms to more tax capital gains for stocks held for short periods of time and discounts for stocks sold after longer periods.
This wouldn't be a magic fix but a good first step.
Another thing that would help would be banning shorting stocks. Shorting makes it more profitable for investors to take a stable, profitable company that isn't experiencing exponential growth and intentionally run it into the ground than it would be to simply let it generate long term revenues.
It's obscene that we haven't banned it and acts like it writ large. It simply shouldn't be legal to sell somebody else's property that they've loaned to you with the intention of buying another one once the price drops. It provides absolutely no value to society, is incredibly risky, and creates perverse market incentives where economic recessions and market crashes can be more profitable for some than the good times.
That still won't change the economy from exploiting workers to give value to people who've done no work at all.
It's fraudulent as fuck. Hedge funds who are also market makers (oh, sure, they claim to be 'separate' yet repeatedly get fined for their behaviour, all while not admitting fault of course). Definitely no conflict of interest there. That's before we even get into 'dark pools': https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dark-pool.asp
When a majority of trades for many companies are conducted with zero oversight, that allows bad actors to manipulate the markets. It's madness to me that this parallel system is allowed to exist. I just picked AAPL at random, 43% of trades were made 'off-exchange' yesterday. ~22m shares traded with zero price action or regulation.
https://chartexchange.com/symbol/nasdaq-aapl/exchange-volume/
But but but there's not zero oversight, they're self-regulated which always works! 🤡
For a stock to go up, the company has to make more profit.
To make more profit, they need to pay their workers less than the value of the goods or services produced.
Therefore, the stock price is a measure of how well a company can exploit its workers.