The Stock Market is Only 5 Companies (Script & Sources)
Added 2021-04-17 01:00:45 +0000 UTCThe stock market is really just 5 companies. Sure, that might sound stupid to say, because there are actually 6,000 companies traded on the NYSE and Nasdaq - but just five of them, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google make up a QUARTER of the entire valuation of the top 500 companies that dictate the stock market. And that’s a huge problem.
First of all, it goes without saying that these companies are monopolies: Nobody can come close to competing with them, they’re able to stifle innovation and buy their competitors and set prices, while giving back almost nothing in taxes by spending millions if not billions lobbying congress to pass laws specifically benefiting them.
But they’re also a massive threat to the economy. For example, the stock market went way up in the second half of 2020, right? Wrong - these 5 stocks went way up, meanwhile the other 495 biggest companies collectively went down. And these five companies are also valued at 35 times what they earn - making them massively overvalued. Now, the value of a company is not just based on earnings, but they shouldn’t be unrelated.
And it’s scary because this is exactly what happening right before the 2000s dot-com bubble burst, and the market lost $5 trillion dollars and 78% of it’s peak value - only then those market dominating companies were Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, Oracle, and IBM.
So, besides all the other good reasons to break up these massive tech companies, the fact that they control the entire stock market is terrible and might crash the economy - who knows?
