Actual serious answer - you’re failing to take into account what economists refer to as the numeraire. You, and other uninformed investors (this is the most polite way for me to describe people who lack sufficient education to participate in financial markets, sorry) are often fooled by looking at the nominal price of a stock or an index, without asking, “What does that nominal price actually mean? What does it mean to be priced in dollars? Could I not alternatively ask how many paper clips a firm is worth?”
I, as an educated person, am smart enough to know that you need a more robust and fundamentally sound numeraire good to determine the true change in value. You see that the S&P500 is down about 1% and the Nasdaq is down about 2%, and you ask, “Y not stonks?”. I see that bitcoin is down 3.5% and dogecoin is down 10%, so when you price the stock indices in terms of virtual currency, they are actually stonking.
Are we supposed to be mad that Robinhood is a scam, or mad that its insiders get paid in stock rather than cash? Or somehow both at the same time? And, inevitably, also mad that retail investors can’t get in on this hot deal?
For me that’s the most banal part of the whole story. If there’s one thing that absolutely personifies this late late probably final stage of the US imperial system it’s the absolute absence of shame or fear of consequence in our elites. That and half of them pretending like this is a surprise and pretending that rules matter when interacting with people below them in the hierarchy.
The well off in the US are much like monarchs in the 1800s. Many of them inherited undeserved wealth, they live in bubbles where they are surrounded by yes-men, they’ve lived their whole lives insulated from bad personal outcomes, and they wrongfully attribute their personal elevated status as evidence of their inherent superiority. Of course they feel no shame - they are Superior so by definition what they do is Good. Of course they fear no consequence, they’ve never been punished before for any choice.
