Say It Together: The Stock Market Is NOT the Economy
Most people don’t understand there are two economies and theirs is getting destroyed
The longer I live, the more I’ve come to realize that most people, Christians included, are overwhelmingly economically illiterate.
The Bible talks about money more than heaven and hell combined, and over a quarter of Jesus’s parables are about money, because a.) money is a faith-test, b.) mammon is a rival god, and c.) the poor stewardship of God’s resources has ruinous effects on the poor… and Jesus rather annoyingly LOVES the poor!
Thanks in no small part to a certain leading radio money guru who’s duped the nation into thinking his brand of money-getting is somehow biblical, financial illiteracy is still rampant.
Take, for instance, the economy.
Most people don’t even understand that there are actually two economies:
The real economy.
The parasite anti-economy.
The real economy is where you and I live and work. We’re talking jobs and joblessness, wages and cost of living, inflation and deflation, wealth and debt, money and credit, the buying and selling of goods and services, human wellbeing and suffering. All useable wealth in society is created in the same way: By human beings applying their God-given time and effort and creativity and energy to God-given natural resources. All wealth is created in the real economy.
And then there is the other economy, a gold-plated vampirical succubus that preys on its host by extracting wealth from the real economy without contributing identically-matching value:
The parasite anti-economy.
Let’s outline a few real-life scenarios to give you an idea of how the parasite anti-economy destroys the real economy:
When business corporations lay off hundreds of working people in the real economy — leaving suffering families without jobs or income — their stock price and dividends in the parasite anti-economy go up.
When institutional land-lorders outbid families for 28% of all single-family house sales in the real economy — leaving families homeless or forced to rent for more than their mortgage payment would’ve been — their stock price goes up as they siphon overpriced rental profits into the parasite anti-economy.
When banksters trap another million poor people with another few hundred billion in unrepayable interest-bearing credit card debt in the real economy — which turns debtors into slaves — their profit, stock price, and dividends go up as they siphon usury into the parasite anti-economy.
When insurance conglomerates deny claims to injured, sick, or dying claimants — leaving real people in horrific pain, suffering, and destitution — they reap profits and bonuses into the parasite anti-economy.
When monopoly corporations like fossil fuel companies jack energy prices and freeze families in the real economy, they rake windfall profits into the parasite anti-economy.
And what do corporations in the parasite anti-economy do with the vast majority of the profits they siphon out of the real economy?
They use those profits to buy more extraction machines, typically called “corporations” or “investments,” to extract more wealth from the real economy.
Banks make more loans.
Land-lorders monopolize more houses.
Monopolies acquire/destroy more of their competitors and lobby-bribe their sponsored politicians for fewer democratic protections for the people and more corporate advantages for the profiteers.
Investors buy more stocks in order to suppress wages and extract corporate profits, driving down worker wages and product quality while driving up the consumer cost of goods and services.
Classical economists from Adam Smith to David Ricardo to John Stuart Mill to Henry George all agreed on who formed the basis for this parasite anti-economy — rentiers:
Bankers extract interest from the real economy but add no matching value to the real economy.
Land-lorders extract rent-usury from the real economy but add no matching value to the real economy.
Monopolists extract corporate monopoly profits from the real economy but add no matching value to the real economy.
Insurers extract corporate profits from the real economy but add no matching value to the real economy.
Investors not building real companies in the real economy, but just buying shares of worker-created wealth to extract wealth but add no matching value to the real economy.
Need to see a recent real-life scenario of the parasite anti-economy in action?
A perfect example of a transfer from the real economy to the parasite anti-economy is the awful “energy plan” put forward last week by Britain’s newest corporatist assassin Prime Minister, a former (and probably future) Shell employee, Liz Truss.
Energy companies are expected to reap £170 billion in surprise profits thanks to Putin’s war in Ukraine. This is literally called war profiteering. Yet Liz Truss refuses to tax it all back to the people. Instead, she’s going to let six million British families burn through their entire life’s savings this winter just to stay warm with monopoly-priced energy.
In addition to forcing 20 million Britons into poverty, analysts suggest thousands of pubs will shutter across the nation, along with much of the hospitality sector (hotels, restaurants, etc) and hundreds of bakers, and thousands of other businesses, resulting in the loss not only of real places of local community culture but in the loss of tens of thousands of jobs and all that consumer spending. Tens of millions of people will shop less, have less, be colder, be unemployed, and experience more suffering while the economy shrivels into recession if not depression.
Why?
So two energy monopolies can keep surprise war profits on top of their already $20+ billion in profits. It’s a huge wealth transfer from the real economy to the parasite anti-economy, and it’s just one of many that silently and secretly happen around the world every day.
The parasite anti-economy will destroy the real economy within our lifetime
While the real American economy is languishing and hasn’t seen any real non-inflation growth since 2008, the parasite anti-economy is growing exponentially.
The parasite anti-economy is grinding the real economy to a halt, and soon, the bottom 99% will be assetless serfs in a global economy without any parasite-free markets whatsoever.
In other words, rentiers are executing a homicide-suicide.
But they don’t care.
As long as they can amass enough real assets first, they can survive a total collapse of the global real economy at the hands of their parasite anti-economy.
The countdown to the end of the real economy
We’re now at the point where 90% of the stock market is owned by the top 10%.
In other words, the stock market has become a measure of the parasite anti-economy, not the real economy.
Irresponsible journalists and newscasters talk about the stock market like it’s the real economy, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Journalists and newscasters should give us a daily and nightly update on both economies — the real economy, and the parasite anti-economy.
For the real economy, they should report on things that really matter, like:
How much rent-usury flowed to land-lorders
How much interest-usury flow to banksters
How many hundreds of thousands of homeless people there are
How many millions of people are unemployed
How many hundreds of millions are grossly underpaid and overworked
How corporate-engineered inflation is eroding purchasing power
How many more public assets were privatized/corporatized
How much wealth flowed out of the real economy into the parasite anti-economy today
For the parasite anti-economy, they’d also report on things that really matter:
How many more billions in interest-bearing loans banks made
How many more properties land-lorders monopolized since yesterday
How many more billions in stock ownership flowed to the top 10%
How much more interest-bearing debt was added to the bottom 90%
How many trillions of dollars of unearned wealth remained untaxed and unspent into the real economy
A countdown clock to when the parasite anti-economy has completely drained the real economy and plunged humanity back into assetless serfdom to enrich the few thousand top families just like feudal times
Because that’s where we’re heading, brothers and sisters.
We’re currently stuck in a system where the parasite anti-economy is buying up all productive assets in the real economy and transferring that wealth to the anti-economy in order to do the same thing all over again until the real economy is completely and totally dead.
How to destroy the parasite anti-economy
All parasites use kill pills to ensure that if they’re ever taken out, they’ll take out the host with them. And that’s exactly what the parasite anti-economy has done with the real economy:
Labor can’t get real wage increases and worker rights because they’re terrified of taking time off work and going into more debt. Interest-bearing debt is what keeps workers from getting fairer wages.
Tenants can’t fight for lower rents or tenant rights or the abolition of rent-usury because they’re terrified of land-lorder retribution in the form of eviction or rent increases.
Borrowers can’t fight for lower interest rates or the abolition of interest-usury because they’re terrified the bank will call their loans and leave them homeless or bankrupt.
So there really is only one way to kill the parasite anti-economy:
We need non-corporatist politicians to kill the parasites.
All the classical economists thought we should “euthanize the rentier class” — John Maynard Keynes’s words — by taxing their unearned profits back into the real economy where all the work of building real wealth and democratic civilization is done.
That’s why they advocated for getting rid of taxes on worker income (so we can spend that money into the real economy to improve our living standards and create more jobs) while implementing massive taxes on unearned rentier money, including bank interest, rents, capital gains, insurance profits, and corporate/resource monopoly profits, in order to ensure a free society.
Can you hear the right-wing extremists rage-typing?
“BUT IF YOU TAX INVESTORS THEY WON’T INVEST!”
Good! Because the stats are clear: Investors aren’t investing in the real economy anymore. Over 90% of corporate earnings are spent on dividends (freebie handouts to the passive rich) and share buybacks (a way of manipulating stock prices that was illegal until 1982), not invested in expansion and real production.
The remaining <10% is mostly spent on acquiring more extraction machines or expanding existing monopolies.
Plus, the stock market is now almost entirely owned by hedge funds. 80% of shareholders are in the 1%, so they use those profits to take on more debt and bid up stock prices.
Think about it rationally:
When you refuse to tax parasites and let rentiers keep unearned profits, they only spend a tiny portion back into the real economy — mostly to build mansions, super-yachts, rocket ships, and doomsday bunkers because they know full well they are collapsing the real economy and will eventually be hunted down.
By refusing to tax the parasite anti-economy, we allow rentiers to gain evermore economic power to drain the real economy.
That’s why debt has exploded to $300+ trillion and climbing.
That’s why house prices have exploded and will reach $10 million in our lifetime.
That’s why prices and the cost of living and prices has exploded.
That’s why there are 3,000+ billionaires while billions suffer.
Because we’re taxing the working poor in the real economy, and helping the rich rentiers in the parasite anti-economy.
Please shake all your braindead friends: We’re taxing the wrong economy.
Corporatist politicians love the parasite anti-economy
They literally exist to serve the dark side:
When corporatist politicians buy corporate bonds and S&P futures to ensure stock prices stay high, they’re helping the parasite anti-economy, not the real economy.
When corporatist politicians prop up the real estate bubble with cheap debt, they’re helping the parasite anti-economy, not the real economy.
When corporatist politicians bail out predator banks and overextended corporations, they’re helping the parasite anti-economy, not the real economy.
The entire point of corporatist government is to enrich the parasite anti-economy at the sacrifice of your real economy.
As economist Michael Hudson puts it:
“The financial sector’s product is debt. We are producing debt, not goods and services and what people actually need. We’re producing economic overhead. Living standards are shrinking. The role of central banks today is to support inflation of asset prices, of stock prices, bond, and real estate, and to deflate the real economy. They want to make sure labor does not get any share of the added growth.”
Make no mistake: Capitalism (private ownership) is dying, and corporatists are the ones killing it. The post-capitalism scenario was supposed to be an evolution into social democracy, but we’re lapsing back into brutal feudalism.
The reality is that the real economy has been shrinking since 2008. It only looks like the economy is growing because corporate stock buybacks and shares bought on margin give the illusion that the stock market is going up.
We need real wealth growth for the bottom 90% in the real economy, not fake price growth for the top 10% in the parasite anti-economy.
We need to kill the parasite anti-economy before it kills our real economy.
So what can Christians do?
We can pray for repentance and revival for the church and the world.
We can get serious about practicing actual biblical financial faithfulness.
We can intercede in society by starting new faith-driven political parties.
We can plant seeds and disciple the world about how to use money to bless.
We can (and must) personally divest of stocks, bonds, income properties, and other anti-economy investments.
We can start non-parasitic businesses like co-ops and not-for-profits.
Lastly, we can pray for mercy when the majority of church-goers and the rest of society do none of these things and our world inevitably descends into neo-feudalism.