Our Stupendous Stocks

The magnificent market has reached record highs. Why? Because the piggish corporations are reinvesting their profits in their companies and NOT sharing the gains with their employees. The government has to demand that companies raise the minimum wage. Full time jobs with benefits are scarce. The average Joe is spending all his time just getting to and from work on clogged highways and trains falling off tracks. Mention union benefits at your job can get you fired. Trump’s perks for the wealthy corporate owners are making them go on a spending spree of stock buying for themselves and most Americans don’t have money to invest in the stock market or are still shy after the Bush era recession of failed Wall Street and the failures of the auto industry then.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJI just reached the   highest ever   at over 25,000.  Donald Trump likes to give himself credit for all the investing, but for most Americans who don’t invest in the stock market, the gains mean nothing.  What is currently happening in the stock market is a great divide over what is happening to most Americans. In 2007 almost 2/3rds of Americans said they had money in the stock market. Now only about half of Americans say they have money in the stock market now. It is the richest 10% of Americans who now own 81% of all stocks in the market now according to Edward Wolf from the National Bureau of Economic Research. So as usual the rich just get richer!

On top of all those rich people buying stocks, stock prices have been rising at a record pace so most good stocks are too expensive for the average American to purchase. People are still living from pay check to pay check with maybe just enough money to pay for their basic bills. Who has extra cash to buy stocks with? Since 2009 big companies have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on themselves. The record amount of stock buybacks is inflating the markets. Companies like Humana bought $3 billion dollars of its own company stock on December 14, 2017. Home Depot went through the roof because it bought $15 billion dollars of its own stock on December 6, 2017.  Hersha bought back $100 million dollars of its stock on January 3, 2018 to drive shareholder ROI up. Are these companies really worth all this money?

Why aren’t these companies spending their profits on the good workers who slave at their jobs to make the companies they work for so profitable? Trump could care less and is giving corporations all kinds of tax breaks and less pollution regulations. It is literally corporate America gone wild! The Dow Jones Industrial Average has gained 5, 000 points in the past year. Yes some retirement accounts have gained in value but for most people all Trump’s crowing and patting himself on his own back for a job well done really doesn’t help most people at all!