No Stupid Questions

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

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all came from, isn't a major value add, it's a thin mask atop the clunkiness of American payment rails that should have been replaced by something like FedNow by 2003.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.

Because its value was always fictitious.

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.

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.

Money and 1/2 of Economics is based on magic and “religious” belief.

The stock market is up because nothing has fundamentally changed. Tarrifs are only going to hurt the consumer.

The stock market is based on value extraction and as long as everyone keeps on working and consuming at reasonable level it will continue to hum along just fine.

Some markets and industries will be harmed by this the tarrifs but these are small fractions of the overall economy. There is also a ton of uncertainty since Trump has a tendency to pull back any measure that affects the market averages.

The pain will be felt by workers and consumers but people have to work and we cannot stop consuming so affected workers will ultimately shift to new places and consumption will shift to new products and the skim will continue.

Global markets aren't going to get shaken up because the global market is incredibly resilient. Prices will quiver for a bit but in the long run they will simply route around us and new normals will emerge.

The only way things change is if the people cause it to change. Either accidentally or on purpose. But the change has to be sudden and swift because there are tons of levers built into the system to force us to participate.

Something like national strike might not be enough unless it can be sustained indefinitely and it's not clear how that could occur. I suspect will take several events each gaining the momentum of the last and there is little chance of a first event for occurring.

The stock market is indicating it doesn't think we have the fortitude and despite what we may want to be true, they know a lot about us and our patterns. Our predictability is to their profit, literally.

Because not enough people are selling.

If people / companies don't believe the stocks will lose value they won't sell. If they don't sell they won't lose value.

keeping its* value

It's called 401ks, literally anyone with a 9-5 job has one. The entire retirement system was designed to keep people invested in the stock market and betting on it.

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.

I am hoping at least the first blatant constitutional case to appear before the Supreme Court would rationalize the market to this shift to fascism and overt imperialism.

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.

Look up how IBM, Coca Cola and Volkswagen (among many, many other companies that are very much still established to this day) got their boom-times during WW2 by supporting both the allies and the fash at the same time. They profited from everything that happened, in every way, and continue to do so.

Fascism is good for business, so to speak.

I’ll agree with what others are saying about speculation but I’ll add a few points…

Meme investing. People just buy shit now. You can download Robinhood or any other free app and buy something you read about because you feel like it. That’s a lot different than traditional stock valuation. And in some cases (GameStop?) the public can have such force that it massively overwhelms traditional stock valuation

The other point is that businesses will still function. Will it suck to have a 20+% tariff? Yes. Will in end a massive global corporation? No. A trade war can’t kill multinationals because they have a foot in both sides, in a sense (that’s a crazy oversimplification)

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?

Look at Tesla stock prices - even after a slight deflation it's astronomically overvalued and divorced from reality.

We're in a speculative bubble baby!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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