Do stock markets still play their traditional role in the economy? Subsidiary question: do businesses make use of stock markets to fund and invest in improvements to their productivity? The response to these two questions must be negative since the shareholders of yesterday have now simply become speculators! Whereas conventional wisdom have wished for sums to be invested in businesses by way of stock markets so as to benefit production plants and their workers, these modern-day gamblers only seek to extract the wealth from their share purchases on the stock market and are not concerned with, or interested in, creating added value. This volte-face and obsession with the short term are in turn draining business\u2019 abilities to innovate, generating nauseating instability on the labour market and exacerbating income inequalities. Businesses are therefore espousing a whole range of morally reprehensible \u2013 and sometimes even criminal \u2013 behaviour in order to satisfy the cupidity of today\u2019s investor.<\/p>\n
Distributing handsomely generous dividends to their shareholders, orchestrating or even manipulating the market price of their shares \u2013 and therefore their shareholders\u2019 underlying profit \u2013 by buying back their own shares, free handouts to their board of directors in the form of shares causing their beneficiaries to fixate on the progress of the these shares\u2019 market price… This irrational generosity that businesses are making customary comes at the expense of training programmes and the production force, and now explains the hyper-concentration of wealth, indeed the gradual disappearance of the middle class in industrialised areas. It is an unremitting logic that demands the sacrifice of expensive but experienced workers, despite them being skilled innovators and creators of value. These share buybacks are effectively bulldozing over careers while at the same time subverting the regulatory role of stock markets.<\/p>\n
This monopolisation by speculators of the heart and soul of businesses \u2013 with their board\u2019s complicity, motivated by the personal profit made from the appreciation of their share prices \u2013 does in fact weigh heavily on the decisions that are made within the company concerning organisation, investment and technological research and development. Stock market prices are now strictly no longer the right \u2013 or the wrong \u2013 way to do business, but are the foolish result of hundreds of millions \u2013 sometimes even billions \u2013 of stocks being reinjected into markets by businesses in order to swell the price of their own shares. With the utmost passivity, we have therefore aided \u2013 and sometimes even actively abetted \u2013 this reversal of values since stock markets are, now, no longer interested in playing their crucial role whereby they once \u2013 helped by the transmission belt of prices \u2013 oversaw the vital responsibility of ensuring companies\u2019 health. This predatory attitude that is wielding itself alongside the complacency of governments is therefore turning companies into cash cows and breaking beyond repair their ability to innovate.<\/p>\n
In short, for the last twenty years it\u2019s the companies that have been financing the stock markets and not the other way around!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Do stock markets still play their traditional role in the economy? Subsidiary question: do businesses make use of stock markets to fund and invest in improvements to their productivity? The response to these two questions must be negative since the shareholders of yesterday have now simply become speculators! Whereas conventional wisdom have wished for sums…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"mc4wp_mailchimp_campaign":[],"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[648941310],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stock-market"],"yoast_head":"\n