Financial freedom in a few years?: What’s behind YouTube traders’ scams?

This is a huge exaggeration, but there are three real reasons for this. First: It is becoming increasingly difficult to escape financial worries through productive work. Second: For many people, work is associated with too much freedom; impossible working hours, despotic bosses, fear of being fired. And best of all: the capital markets mantra is truth.

no remorse

According to McKinsey, global gross financial assets reached $1.540 trillion in 2020; That’s 18 times global GDP. If this value changes by just 1 per thousandth per working day, almost 50 times (old) assets are moved than the new GDP created. Who wants to work there when there is so much to be gained from speculation?

Almost everyone now knows someone, directly or indirectly, who became financially free due to the vagaries of the financial market. This could be because the person inherited an overpriced property, purchased Bitcoins in time, or bet on the right stock. Seen this way, the promises of YouTube financial advisors – no matter how dubious they may be in individual cases – certainly have a real basis.

Also: Unlike social fraud, financial fraud is neither punishable nor associated with remorse. On the contrary: Successful speculation is seen as evidence of an achievement of which one can be proud. So, who built the Ferraris, yachts, swimming pools of financial investors, who baked their bread, who educated their children? Speculative earners live off the labor of others just as much as welfare scammers. But their money comes from the state treasury, which “all of us” support. This is noticed when a welfare recipient drives a Ferrari or has a swimming pool built. While social control isn’t always perfect, it works.

An air of efficiency surrounds him

This control is lacking for financial speculators. Their money or the services they request come from anonymous sources. The “market mechanism” reserved this for them. Successful speculators are surrounded by an aura of efficiency. Your earnings are considered proof of your performance. But they also benefit from a world with limited resources. What some have more or fail to achieve is what others lack. The fact that the winners of the financial market pay for their consumption with “their own” money does not change the fact that they receive these benefits without receiving any physical return, and therefore – like welfare fraudsters – they live off the labor of others.

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The misallocation of labor and resources associated with these fraudulent capital market incentives goes far beyond welfare fraud. This is not noticed at all: Normals, and especially large speculators, are not sitting at their laptops. For this purpose, they and we have asset managers, asset managers or real estate agents. Their work is recorded as productive in GDP, just like that of construction workers or nurses. This is ultimately inefficient, solely redistributive work now consumes more than a tenth of GDP. The trend is increasing: global assets need to be managed and they are growing much faster than GDP.

Just the tip of the iceberg

Our YouTube merchants are just the tip of the iceberg; but they can perform a useful social function: film works show social parasites who ostentatiously reject all productive work and yet live in luxury. There is no better way to summarize fraudulent capital market incentives.

But unfortunately we are already quite blind in this regard.