Posted on 02/10/2021 5:02:51 AM PST by Magnatron
They are about to put the golden goose in the oven. Miami will become the new financial center of the country. Its already started.
Another feather in Cuomo’s legacy cap, killing thousands of nursing home residents and chasing the stock exchange out of NY. Maybe he should just demolish the Empire State Building for the trifecta.
Taxing the rich is like herding cats.
It sounds good until you try to actually do it....
[The Fed can prop up stock values for a long long time.
The crash will come _eventually_, and when it does it will be epic.
What that means in the real world is that today’s stock market is a casino.
I prefer casinos—at least I know what the odds are...even if they are against me. ]
Investing in a profitable business is a positive sum game. The profits accumulate to the business’s balance sheet, such that the business is worth more, and both pre-IPO and post-IPO investors gain from the added value, over time. While the stock market can overvalue a business from time to time, that value always returns to some equilibrium ratio. Once it breaches a certain minimum value, a competitor or a private equity fund will launch a takeover attempt to realize that value for itself, while rewarding shareholders with a higher price than evident in the stock price prior to the takeover.
Most stocks aren’t overvalued, by traditional financial measures. The exceptions are companies like Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Netflix, etc.
[The Fed can prop up stock values for a long long time.
The crash will come _eventually_, and when it does it will be epic.
What that means in the real world is that today’s stock market is a casino.
I prefer casinos—at least I know what the odds are...even if they are against me. ]
The key differences? Liquidity and protections. Trying to sell your share of a restaurant business is not an easy task for two reasons - valuing the business and finding a buyer. Buyers are scarce because it’s a very specialized type of purchase and usually involves a significant lump sum of cash involving tens of thousands, at minimum. Valuing the business is similarly difficult because the buyer has to trust the general partner to not work a finagle on him (i.e. by simply pocketing and not recording cash inflows) in a way he would not stick it to you because you are the partner’s kin.
Whereas with stocks, selling your shares is simply a matter of clicking on a web page, and can be done in seconds. And questions of self-dealing and fraud are mostly kept under control by the SEC and nationally-known auditors.
All shareholders in a small business are relying to a large extent on the general partner’s personal integrity. That is not the case with publicly-traded stocks, where regulatory watchdogs are on the job, however imperfectly. Criminal self-dealing and fraud with respect to publicly traded companies are punished with substantial prison terms. Prosecutors have no issue justifying the expenditure of large sums of money on these investigations because the sums involved are huge - typically in the tens of millions up to billions of dollars. Whereas a small business wrangle involving tens of thousands of dollars in misappropriated funds won’t get the prosecutor’s name in the headlines or make him famous enough to campaign for his next job (mayor, Congressman, governor, etc), meaning most such investors are out of luck.
You and I are not looking at the same stock market.
Just for starters—all trades are “front-run”.
That means the dealers/brokers get to look at the trade before they execute it, and profit as a result.
That is _worse_ than a casino.
The regulation of the markets is a total joke. It is a revolving door between the regulators and the industry, and the weak law enforcement is only exceeded by pathetic legislation that is always many years behind the latest Wall Street scam.
As to corporate financial statements, they are a tissue of lies if you actually read all the footnotes that negate the text. I have an MBA from one of those “fancy” schools, and I would not trust _any_ corporate balance sheets as far as I could throw them.
The corporations have created _huge_ incentives for senior management to lie, much greater than any risk of getting caught.
Add to that the basic fact that sociopaths rise to the top of large organizations, and you have a wacky “market” that should not be trusted by anyone.
I am hearing “Atlas Shrugged’ in my ears.....
Time to read it AGAIN........
California already got spanked for charging taxes to former residents who moved...LATE 80’s ???
Taxation Without Representation was ruled for the former residents.
Same would apply in a future attempt, IMO.
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