No Stupid Questions

It's almost like financial value is artificially assigned or something, and not, like, intrinsic.

Because it's now completely disconnected from the reality of the actual economy. It has been for a very long time. It has to do with how much money is funneled into the wealthiest hands.

Our new defacto president is the avatar of bubble economics.

Even the other oligarchs, thry made something at dramatic scale to justify their wealth. Microsoft did sell a lot of software. Facebook got 176 billion people on board to blast adverts at. They're trillion dollar firms that do correspondingly large run rates.

Tesla is still a minor player in its space, and SpaceX is inherently a narrow business. Even PayPal, where the horrors all came from, isn't a major value add, it's a thin mask atop the clunkiness of American payment rails that should have been replaced by something like FedNow by 2003.

But he's taken these tiny fundamentals and convinced Wall Street to puff more air into them than a fresh bag of Lay's.

how the market isn’t down 75% - 90% by this point.

I keep asking myself this same question as I stare at my retirement savings in what seems like trump's crosshairs. I only have a few possible answers, and none of them are enough to explain the continued high valuations.

The only things i know are: "the market is irrational" and "time in the market beats timing the market". How long before the crash occurs? How much gains are lost if I pull it out too early? Days? Years? Even if I were to pull everything out now, when would I know its safe to put it back in? Would I accurately be able to determine the bottom of the market and magically put it all back in to reap the spoils? If the damage trump does to our country destroys the value of the dollar, then even having pulled everything to cash would mean it would be in (at that time) worthless US Dollars.

I'm simply not that smart to execute that successfully and I don't pretend to be.

This is the pump before the dump. Institutional investors are slowly exiting and retail investors are making up most of the volume.

We were due for a correction or crash but Biden and the Fed held it off long enough for the election. There is a lot of money sitting on the sidelines waiting to grab assets, housing etc on the cheap.

Grifters like Trump can’t wait to get it started. In every crisis there is opportunity what Trump does with this crisis will likely reshape our government.

The stock market is speculative and is not a reflection of reality nor is it a good measure of the health of an economy.

Because it's basd on bullshit metrics that mean nothing?

What power on earth is allowing Hedge Funds, Banks and Small Investors the justification to keep betting on an underlying business system which is literally being pulled apart at the seams ...

When you're a hammer, everything is a nail. That's all they know how to do, and they still have enough capital to keep doing it.

There are insane mistakes being made multiple times a day now. At some point, the high stakes game of Don't Break the Ice will come to a sudden end. Putting the cubes back in the game board would require an expenditure of capital. Capitalists spend money to buy more money. The only time they spend money to avoid losing money is when they've lost money for a very specific reason multiple times, and maybe not even then.

Trump: "I'll run the USA like a company!"

How business people run companies: Fire all the competent people and replace with cheaper new hires. Report huge short term profits due to reduced payroll. Stock goes up. CEO ditches company and sells off stock before all the new hires completely wreak the company and tank the stock price.

Why wouldn't the stock market be up at this point?

Why should anything be crashing at this point? Everyone is still working, right? Value is still being extracted from workers, right? People are still buying things, aren't they?

The stock market will only start crashing once the effects actually reach people's spending/working behavior, which it didn't yet.

Crime. It was crime before, but it's crime now too.

The people who were supposed to be in charge of preventing the crime didn't do it before because they were part and party to it, they certainly won't enforce the laws now.

A few reasons:

1. Market prices are more often determined by speculation than actual intrinsic value. People will say that the market is "efficient" in the sense that everything is valued efficiently based on the value it's worth, but take one look at meme stocks and you'll see that prices can easily be influenced by large volumes of purchases instead of any actual intrinsic value in the corporation being invested in. A lot of money being funneled into index funds can lead to the price of stocks continually increasing without actual value of the underlying companies being taken into account as much as you would think.

2. Fascism is supported by, and continues to support capitalism. Corporations benefit from capitalism, especially under a system where safeguards are removed and businesses can make larger profit margins as a result.

3. A lot of the changes Trump is making hurt working people, but don't hurt corporations. (and often even help corporations directly) For instance, he's making union busting easier, knows that any tariffs can simply be passed on by the companies without shrinking their margins, (just costing you more), is cracking down on legal immigration to the point that illegal migrant workers are even easier to exploit with the threat of deportation, etc. A lot of the bad things Trump is doing will only affect us, not corporations or the capital owning class.

That depression that's coming is only for the working class. The rich will keep making money using us indentured workers as slaves to make more money.

Because the stock market isn't a measure of how well a country is operating. On the contrary, deregulation allows companies to boost profit via harmful means. Rich people got it good under Trump/Republicans and therefore the stock market thrives until disaster strikes and it all comes crashing down.

The stock market has no attachment to reality any more

As others have said, the stock market has little to do with reality. It's focused on money and business reports. As long as companies are showing profits, the stock market literally doesn't care.

Something only hits it when businesses hit it. Look at today's market. Walmart posted bad futures and the whole market recoiled (only a bit but still).

There's also just the denial phase. Lots of people, at lots of levels, are dependent on the stock market for their own finances. Literally everyone with a 401k has an interest in the market doing well. Saying "welp, we're fucked" is just not something that anyone wants to put towards wall street. It's why we have market "crashes", because people hold out until the water covers the bow of the sinking shop then they freak out and bail out at the last second.

You expect people to take their money from stocks and put into what exactly?

Putting it in "someplace safe like our pockets" is neither safe, nor something people can do in large numbers. They can put it in bank accounts in large numbers, how safer than stocks do you think those are?

Fascist coups succeed when the rich have bought into the coup.

Why would the rich seizing full control of the state make the stock market go down?

If you believe all kinds of capitalist ideology and pseudo-science, then it might seem strange.

But in reality fascism is great for capital. Also the fed prints hella money to prop it all up.

I pulled my money out when he took office. There WILL be a crash and recession, and it will be intentional. There will be all kinds of irrational exuberence to get everyone all in, and then crash it to mop up the spoils and expand the wealth gap.

Investors understand that he's going to do everything he can to transfer wealth to the top. That makes it safe to invest more because more will be coming in. That's my casual guestimate.

Because this is the Second Business Plot, and this time it worked.

When the Berlin Wall fell, the predictions made at the time were for several decades of low intensity conflict ('war on terror') followed by another major world war. This is the expected state of the world, not some surprise outcome from out of nowhere that the capitalists haven't planned for.

Australia is still being shielded from Chinese expansionism by NATO's anti-access and area-denial strategy emplaced along the islands off China's coast.

If the war in Europe expands and heats up, it will be European cities that get destroyed and EU citizens who will have to choose to fight for their autonomy or preemptively surrender to subjugation by the Tsar. USA pulling back from supporting Ukraine forces the EU to pick a path and walk it. Either they build an army capable of self-defense, or they'll be overrun. The fighting in Ukraine prevents Russia from building up forces, buying the EU time to arm themselves, if that's what they decide they want to do. If they move fast, there's a chance they can win the war before it really begins.

Expect to see nuclear proliferation. Modern wars have shown that non-nuclear armed states are a toothless prey species that only exist so long as their nuclear armed neighbors permit it. During the reconstruction era following WWII, USA's relative advantage in infrastructure and technology allowed them to grant credible security guarantees. Now that the rest of the world has caught up, USA's defense promises have lost credibility (for example, see Ukraine).

The ocean is full of submarines, and the coastlines bristle with long range, precision missiles. World trade is expected to be among the first casualties of the next world war. Countries that are not self-sufficient will be unable to replenish their losses. Economic protectionism is a matter of national security.

Dismantling USA's Federal government serves the interests of organized crime, ie the capitalists that own Wall Street. They're getting squeezed by de-globalization but also expect to be able to expand into new criminal enterprise enabled by deregulation and the dismantling of the Federal government's investigative capabilities. Without having someplace better to invest capital, might as well let it ride despite the chaos. With a world war, and possibly a nuclear exchange, just over the horizon, there really isn't any safe place to put one's money, except perhaps housing and real estate in those parts of the world expected to survive. Canada. Siberia. Greenland.

If we do nothing to reduce atmospheric CO2, global heating will eventually cap out at 5 degrees C and won't go higher due to diminishing returns. The far north will need to invest in agricultural infrastructure, but once that gets built out in the warmer world, there will be more arable land than there is today. Its going to be boom times for real estate developers.

Because of the cuts. It'll be a year or so of smooth sailing.... then, as the chickens come home to roost: nosedive.

The same way Bitcoin keeps value; most of the supply never changes hand. In Bitcoin because the wallets are no longer accessible, in stock because the owners live comfortably on dividends alone.

The stock market will always be up and going up if people keep putting more money in it.

Stocks represent all assets that can be sold and traded publicly. Although US infrastructure is crumbling, all the shit is still there.

Times are hard but we still have obscene material wealth (for now, here is hoping climate change doesn’t reduce that too much). Ironically, stocks should have gone down in the pandemic cause of the productive capacity dropping but it didn’t cause a lot of cash was printed.

For stock prices to tumble down and crash, people need to take their money out of it. That’s only going to happen if there is another economy that people prefer to put their money in (like China).

So what is more likely to happen is we keep having stock prices go higher and higher, cause more and more money would be in circulation (so inflation). But our productive capacity could drop. So we could become much more poor, have little wealth all around, and go to the baker to buy 1 loaf of bread with $1000 price tag.

TLDR: when your economy represents basically “everything”, it won’t crash unless human civilization crashes.

A little while ago the entire market went red. If it's doing well now then that's only comparative to everything going on then.

That said, gutting regulations certainly will boost profits short term, if you care more about that than human life and happiness.

Trump is generating an enormous level of security risk globally, which encourages investment money flow to the country with the biggest military. Ironically, that happens to be the US.

Because the speculative "economy" necessarily grows faster than the actual economy.