President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

When you put up capital to own part of a company, you take the risk to that capital to try to acheieve growth. Not stasis, or worse, going backward. ... Otherwise, nobody would ever risk their capital. We wouldn't have McDonald's. ... or Apple or Costco or J&J, etc. without that growth incentive. People risk their money for growth, because growth is the driver that potentially makes the company you own worth more to someone else when you want to sell your stake.

I don't know why that would be shocking to anyone. People risk their money to try to make the company more valuable and profit. Otherwise, nobody would take that risk. They'd just stuff their savings (which is what fuels investment) in a mattress, or they'd clip a coupon for steady income and we could all still be living the way we did in 1770 (exagerating. ... but "income investing," while valid for people with a lot of money who just want to live off the income, would not draw capital from people who are willing to take risk -- even just moderate risk in a "blue chip" company like McDonalds -- and we'd never progress or get innovation or anything new even). FWIW, McDonald's dividend is less than 2.5 percent. It doesn't even keep up with inflation in this environment. If you wanted to own that company for income, you are not doing very well either.

 

Yup. We have made a sport of that by letting our government put in a price-fixing authority that intentionally misprices the cost of that borrowing, in order to encourage people to risk other people's money. ... and when it goes wrong, that same government has continually stepped in to bail it all out.

It's what gets me when people tell me about "modern capitalism."

 

They both are. Elon Musk has made a career of buying taxpayer-funded loans and handouts and subsidies and government contracts. He is throwing $X a month in contributions to Donald Trump right now and trying to get him elected in the hope of being paid back with much more on top of it, at a later time.

Last night, that chat featured perhaps the two most dishonest, transactional (emphasis on this) bullshit artists of our time. In the case of Trump, he has no filter, so he's not even very polished about the transactional nature of everything he supposedly "stands" for.