Don’t Cry for the Titans of Tech

Don’t Cry for the Titans of Tech

Poor and middle class people, not corporations, are being robbed

By Mark Luedtke

Dayton’s Conspiracy Theorist

Maybe you’ve heard the latest news about poor Apple. It’s stock crashed 10 percent Thursday, but the bigger story is what happened over the last few months. CNBC reports, “Thursday's losses push Apple's market valuation below $700 billion and behind the market cap of Alphabet to become the fourth most valuable publicly traded U.S. company — down from the top spot just two months ago. The company has lost $450 billion in market value since its peak of about $1.1 trillion last year.”

And of course the press identifies the reason in their narrative. We’re supposed to believe weaker than forecast iPhone sales in China caused the 41 percent drop in Apple’s market cap.

In a seemingly unrelated story, Bloomberg reports, “Mark Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar stock sale ground to a halt in the final months of 2018. The Facebook Inc. co-founder didn’t sell a single share in the fourth quarter, when the social media company’s stock tumbled 20 percent amid a broader market rout. It’s the first quarter in more than two years he’s refrained from doing so, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.”

Of course there’s a reason for Facebook’s stock meltdown, different than Apple’s. In Facebook’s case, the narrative is privacy issues are causing the stock to collapse.

Speaking of the FAANGs - Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google’s parent company Alphabet - they’ve all been dropping. Weak demand is blamed, but David Stockman, Reagan’s former budget director, issued a prescient warning a year and a half ago. “During the last 70 days, the FAANGS have gained $260 billion in value, while the other 495 companies in the S&P 500 have lost an identical amount. And on that utterly unmistakable pattern history is absolutely clear,” he wrote. “That’s a radical narrowing of the market if there ever was one. It’s also evidence that the eye of a financial hurricane now sits dead atop the canyons of Wall Street. When the market narrows to a handful of momo names, it’s all over but the shouting. Like the case of the Nifty Fifty back in the early 1970s, a crash is just around the corner.”

It’s as if the people writing these articles don’t know this same situation has occurred before many times. Maybe they never heard of the dot.com crash of 2001 or the housing crash of 2008. The common denominator in these articles is they all fail to mention tech stocks, and everything else, are in the biggest bubble in history created by the Federal Reserve, and that bubble is collapsing.

The same scenario is happening all over the world for the same reason: Central banks have been printing money in concert like never before. They’ve created a worldwide bubble, the biggest in history. The coming crash will be the biggest in history. Apple, Facebook, and all the FAANGs stocks are falling because the bubble is bursting.

But don’t cry for Cook, Zuckerberg or any of the rest of the tech titans. They’ll still have billions after the wreckage. The real victims of central bank printing are poor and middle class people.

After ten years of hearing fake news about a recovery from the last bubble-crash, CBS News recently published an honest story about the consequences. “A decade after the financial crisis, the U.S. economy seems to be firing on all cylinders, with unemployment at a 50-year low and growth hitting its stride. But a deeper look reveals a more troubling picture: Between 2012 and 2015 -- a period when the recovery seemed to be gaining speed -- nearly half of all counties nationwide saw flat or declining growth, according to new government data,” it admitted.

Except for those who never leave the big city, we’ve all seen places the supposed recovery never reached. That’s because half of the country never recovered.

In fact, the recovery for the other half is an illusion. Here’s how it works: The Federal Reserve, or any central bank in any country, prints a bunch of money and hands it out to the big banks. Not backed by anything, the money is essentially counterfeit except by law. The big banks counterfeit more money and hand it out to commercial banks. That money tends to go into the coffers of big corporations like the FAANGs first, then it trickles down to rulers and their cronies. Banks, corporations, and rulers at every level amass wealth with the counterfeit money, and they create temporary jobs that are touted as part of the economy recovery.

But people who don’t receive the counterfeit money early - most of us - become poorer. It’s the same as if you printed a bunch of perfect counterfeit money and gave it to your friends. You and your friends would amass real wealth, but everybody else would become poorer because of it. It’s invisible theft. Eventually, when you’ve stolen too much, the bubble bursts.

This is how the rich get richer while the poor get poorer and income inequality grows.

Central bank counterfeiting also sucks wealth out of the economy into wasteful projects. Soon we’ll see more empty factories, shopping centers, condos, half-developed housing developments, and other unfinished projects join the rubble we already see from previous bubble-bust cycles.

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