You can have an impact on the real economy with stocks. Look at what happened with GameStop. But that impact is done and decided by the wealthiest, who will reap the benefits of it.
But if you live paychecks by paychecks, having no money to put into stocks, you just suffer the consequences of this impact.
How are stocks not a limited resource? I know companies occasionally issue new stock to rise capital for new business ventures but that doesn’t happen that often no?
1% of US-based companies are publicly traded. And publicly trader companies only make up about 1/3 of national employment.
Well, let's broaden the scope a bit then. Beyond simply issuing new shares, you can found a new company. This happens a lot, outside the bay, you just don't hear or think about it unless it's a VC backed firm hoping to make it huge. When it's a sole proprietorship, crickets. Perhaps this is fine, but there are different modes of ownership across the country.
This is not true for the vast majority of employees and is a bit out of touch.
And it's a feedback system, next time they choose the red or blue pimp, their ballot will be worth less due to increase in lobbying money held by the 10-1-0.1% - lobbying money used to purchase tax cuts for the same 10-1-0.1%.
Securities are by definition limited. Splits and IPOs are the only places stocks are born, and those are carefully regulated.
And... while the language is inflammatory, it seems to me like the top are meeting the definition of "hoarding" them. That's what owning 89% of something means.
I live in a poor neighborhood in a reasonably large city.
I shop locally (even avoiding the more affluent neighborhoods), exclusively if possible, as a matter of voting with my wallet because the businesses in my neighborhood employ mostly local folks.
At large scale, yeah, you're right. But for a small local business, one or two extra regular customers can be a bigger difference (drop in a bucket vs drop in the ocean). Even something like shopping at a local big-box supports the local proletariat more than shopping at Amazon, where the proletariat isn't guaranteed to be local at all (and to be clear: it's more about supporting the proletariat than the capitalists).
The bottom 90% of Americans held about 11% of stocks, and added $1.2 trillion in wealth during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The top 10% saw the value of their stocks gain 43% between January 2020 and June of 2021, according to the Fed. The bottom 90% saw stock wealth rise at a lower rate — 33%.