4 ms·

Yes, it’s an incentive to encourage buying by reducing the commitment.

• recursive 6y ago
  It does seem to have that effect. It also seems to have other effects. And it seems to be mostly other effects. If funding companies requires all those effects, it seems legitimate to question whether it's a net benefit.
  • pb7 6y ago
    I would take you more seriously if you spoke more concretely. What other effects, specifically? I’ll give you one: it distributes wealth by letting the common man invest in highly valuable companies rather than limiting it to just wealthy people profiting from entrepreneurship. I’ll bet you you and people like you wouldn’t be too happy if only the original founders of companies like Apple, Facebook, Google and their descendants owned those companies. Do you know how I know? Because Jeff Bezos owns just 11% of his own company and people still hate him despite that the other near 90% has made other people very wealthy too. Now imagine he owned 100% of it. That’s what you’re advocating for. If you think Jeffy boy would be more generous to his employees if he owned all of it, then you must not know the realities of most family owned businesses.
    • recursive 6y ago
      I don't think I'm advocating for anything. I don't know what all the effects of the stock market are, but it seems like it probably has some. It's probably best you don't take me seriously. I don't have any strongly held opinions about any of it. Maybe I'll develop some, but I'm just trying to figure it out for now.
    • runarberg 6y ago
      I’m not parent but I’m gonna chime in here and take this threat do yet another direction: You have to ask your self, who are these people that have gotten extremely wealthy from Amazon? How did they contribute to generating that wealth? From where does the wealth come from that they are profiting from? Now some of that wealth goes to hedge funds and workers see some of it in their 401(K) and what not. But if the alternative is that non of these people that invested in Amazon got extremely wealthy from it... They just got their investment’s worth and a little extra (like a proper loan would). And the wealth generated by Amazon would stay within the company, let’s be a little ideological here and imagine that this wealth would actually be used to pay workers what they deserve. Don’t you think the workers would get more from that deal, perhaps they could use that extra money to open up a saving account, perhaps they could pay it in social security. Anyways I really don’t see in what possible world the existence of the stock market can benefit workers. It just does not seem to work out mathematically. To use the Occam’s razor here... If you have to invent epicycles to explain your case, perhaps the simpler explanation is true. This stock market + 401(K) + hedgefuns + etc. seems to me just to be a bunch of epicycles, and money is actually simply being siphoned away from the value generated by the workers into rich folks that use the stock market for that endeavor. I see two possibilities here: a) The stock market is a predatory lending scheme b) The stock market is a pyramid scheme Either way the stock market should crash and burn