Modern wealth is a parlour game played by the well fed
chrbutler.com
chrbutler.com
Market goes down: "grr... this is just a dastardly ploy to further wealth inequality because the rich can buy stuff on the cheap!"
Market goes up: "grr... this is just a dastardly ploy to further wealth inequality because stocks are overwhelmingly held by the rich!"
For example, pump and dump schemes have both an up part and a down part. Not hard to understand things can be manipulated in either direction to benefit a specific group.
The pump and dump analogy doesn't really work because the crash associated with the "dump" isn't something that the organizer wants, nor do they benefit from the crash. It's just an unfortunate side effect from them cashing out and the truth catching up to them. Meanwhile the OP argues the opposite, claiming that companies knowingly made bad loans to create a crash, which implies more nefarious behavior than the standard explanation of bubbles caused by irrational exuberance. The latter is a conjecture that's not supported by any empirical evidence or even anecdotes.
Whereas for regular people, an upswing means nothing, whereas a downswing means job loss, mortgage rate hikes, etc.
And poor can also capitalize on the up swings.
The difference is not so much in access to markets, but in who plays them better.
There are also major omissions like the fact that mortgage rates are often fixed (poor are protected), but margin rates are generally not (rich get hurt).
The fixed rate payer/receiver is protected but they typically pay for that protection.
Easy.
You scoff at their representation of the problem probably because you think they are blaming everyone else but themselves, but objectively speaking, they are making an observation that would hold if one were, in fact, observing a fundamentally rigged system architecture. If you break down the principles around how the system works, it's an inevitable conclusion buying power centralizes, the people it centralizes in gain influence over the optimization function, they optimize it toward greater value centralization, and away from other actor's capacity to exercise agency and survive. Stable feedback loop established, checkmate in 5 (whatever units it takes five of to hit your personal definition of an unacceptable degree of centralization.
Important thing to also note, is that even if your sympathies are vested with the people the power is centralizing in, you're threatened by the increased level of conspicuousness and undeniability to everyone else. If the odds of someone coming after you significantly increases after your first 1-10 million dollars say; getting you 1 possible attempt on your safety to foil every 5 years, but every billion gets you an attempt every couple weeks; is it really still worth it? There's a lot of "Them" and "They" only have to succeed once. It behooves one to acknowledge that those dollars are perhaps better distributed to the point of raising everyone else up so as not to make yourself such a conspicuous target.
Food for thought.
The person writing the article clearly has no idea what they're talking about if they believe this is true.
Of course! All the rich people just go along with it, to be social.
> The wealthy don’t play in some abstract financial dimension removed from the rest of us. They play on our lives, our communities, our systems. And when they make risky moves—when they place bold bets or break things for the sake of entertainment—the consequences are wildly asymmetric.
Every other human being physically present anywhere near me also plays on my life, my community, and my system. If I get physically attacked walking down the street today, the odds that the perpetrator is a mentally-ill homeless person are much greater than that it's a rich person. My manager at my last corporate job is probably richer than me because he worked at the company for longer than I did, and I think that had very little to do with how my interactions with that manager, who is ultimately another employee of the same organization, actually went. I myself am wealthy compared to many other people in my life. Every voting citizen in the political communities I live in votes for the politicians who pass laws that affect how things happen in those communities. I face potential consequences from many classes of people making risky moves - the wealthy aren't particularly special here.
Anyway, this article is basically, very verbosely, claiming that people who the author characterizes as wealthy ("When you have true wealth—defined in my mind as far more than enough—failure doesn’t threaten your position.", which is incredibly vague - who, specifically, has far more than enough? Why should other people share your definition?) - are doing something unspecified in order to deliberately cause stock market crashes in order to buy stocks at a low price. He doesn't say how this happens, what specific people are at fault, or what specific decisions he thinks other people should make instead.
I checked the about page of the blog author:
> I am a graphic designer with over twenty years of experience in interaction design, product design, design leadership and training, and business and marketing strategy.
> Over the last decade, I have personally consulted over 200 creative, digital, and marketing firms on how to better understand audience attention, leverage design and technology to make the best use of it, and measure the signals that matter.
> I am currently the Chief Design Officer at Newfangled and Magnolia. I manage all things design in both places.
Given this biography, I think there's a good chance that he has more money and power than I do. Certainly I've never been the Chief Design Officer at any design firm, with managerial power over other people. I'm sure that there are decisions he could make well or poorly - by someone's standards - that would affect the value of that company or the livelihoods of other people who work there. Is he himself part of the wealthy class he attacks? Does he himself have "far more than enough" wealth?