[Lumper20]

“The thing is that it’s really not that hard to hire someone, and one of the easiest ways is to own a corporation and make it hire people. Right now in the US there’s about $18T worth of corporations that employ about 120M Americans. That comes out to about $150K per job. Imagine if the all the gold bugs on the FR dumped their gold & bought stocks —we’d end up with higher employment, plus a lot of freepers would be much better off.”

First, Gold bugs or anyone buying stocks would not guarantee a single job as the stocks bought have already been issued. The effect would most likely be a short term increase in the stock price and not new stock be issued. Even if this created more favorable borrowing terms for the corp. or corps,that would not guarantee one single new job.

[expat_panama]

buying stocks would not guarantee a single job

--and there's no guarantee the sun will come up tomorrow but that doesn't stop a reasonable person from just saying "yeah, sun's coming up tomorrow and bigger corps hire more. 

When I buy stock I own the company because they're using my money --just like when you mortgage your home you owe money to the guy that buys your lien from the original lender.  There's no way around the fact that virtually all US payroll employees are hired by Corporations that first had to sell stocks for lots of money.  There's also no way around the fact that people were willing to pay lots of money only because they could later sell those shares for even more money.

It doesn't matter if you agree, things are what they are; this is the historic value of all stocks along with how many people have jobs--

--and what happens is corps hire when the stock goes up, and the stock goes up when people spend money bidding up stocks.