bedlam - 11:31 pm on Jul 14, 2004 (gmt 0)

If a company's stock doesn't go up people STOP BUYING IT and those who already have it SELL IT. That makes the stock go down. And everyone who has mutual funds or a retirement plan with any portion of it based on stocks just lost some of their retirement income.

The point was supposed to be that, if the overall standard of living that people enjoy were higher (i.e. people's costs were a smaller portion of their income overall), they wouldn't have to rely on (relatively) high-return investment strategies such as mutual funds.

Besides, my other point still stands: unless it is gradually wound down, there is either a terrible crash at the end of the 'ever-increasing-profit' cycle, or a blackened, impoverished wasteland of a world where a select group has lots of nice shiny stuff and no one else has a pot to p*** in or a window to throw it out of...

The system is out of control.

-B