Stockmarkets, inequality and investor behaviour

Yesterday, Michael Snyder gave us a doomster report on the stock market, which he sees as being in an "absolutely massive" bubble. The redoubtable Marc Faber agrees, as do many others.

Noting that 82% of individually held stocks are owned by just 5% of Americans, Snyder comments:

"When this stock market bubble does burst, those wealthy Americans are going to be in for a tremendous amount of pain."

This is the point at which I have to say, "hairy, spherical objects!" What pain?

If you are truly rich, you do not need to sell your stocks. Once you have ownership, and assuming that you have lots of cash and income from other sources, the notional sale value of your shares is an irrelevance. How much of his 700 acres of land in central London has the Duke of Westminster sold off whenever the property market was in a slump? Exactly.

There's still some fantasy that the Dow (or the S&P, whatever) is a measure of the well-being of the nation. Actually, it's a distraction. What matters is whether you have a sustainable economy, and what social arrangements you are prepared to tolerate. The answers appear to be "no" and "terrible".

Aside from rapidly building up gold reserves and planning to dispense with the US dollar as the world's settlement currency, China is now cashing out of the casino and buying land and businesses in America. The 5% will still be just fine, thank you, as the elites are in many of the worst countries in the world, but a growing number of Americans will find that they have become indentured slaves and their masters have sold them; billionaire Hugo Salinas Price thinks this is historically inevitable and the dream of democracy is due to end soon.

Unless you act.

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