NEW YORK - President Donald Trump’s tariffs have spooked investors, with fears of an economic downturn driving a stock market sell-off that has wiped out US$4 trillion (S$5.3 trillion) from the S&P 500’s peak last month, when Wall Street was cheering much of Mr Trump’s agenda.
The fact that spooking the market could wipe out such an absurd amount of money, larger than many GDPs - and the economy hasn’t even crashed completely at all yet - should provide a good reference for how much of billionaire wealth is actually just abstract numbers representing nothing tangible but raw power over people and processes.
I’m struggling a little to understand the main aim of this comment. It’s not untrue, there’re just a lot of parts going in different directions and, potentially, coming from different places. Without context it’s kinda just a surface observation, ya know?
i think the commenter is just baffled at how drastically overvalued (over hyped) so many stocks are - a well known problem where speculative over investment can and does distort the whole economy and has power over the whole population. see for example, speculation bubbles like the dotcom overvaluation or subprime mortgages, or Theranos, or Bitcoin, or even how Tesla stock was being traded higher than the next 6-8 major car companies combined.
in other words, stock prices are a bunch of bullshit.
stocks are not “money” they’re placeholders for value, speculative bets on what something is worth and therefore they can fluctuate rapidly, as rapidly and suddenly as human emotions.
At some level of wealth, money stops being conceptually a medium of exchange for goods and services, and just becomes a scoreboard for bragging rights.