From Jared Brock on capitalism and financial incentives:
Turning anything — money, houses, scotch — into investment products skyrockets the price of things.
Financialization… the process of turning anything into an investment… skyrockets prices.
Think Taylor Swift concert tickets, Beanie Babies, baseball cards, cryptocurrency, etc.
Turning an item into an investment increases its price.
We’re currently witnessing this with the financialization of classic cars, high-end wine and scotch, and fractional investment in paintings.
A rare piece of canvas covered in colored paint is only “worth” $100 million if the investor knows he can rent that painting to a museum and re-sell it for $110 million in the future.
Because it’s more profitable to get rich by monopolizing stuff and lending it for a profit instead of actually working to create new stuff to sell, the rich are actually incentivized to bid up prices instead of creating new useable goods and services for others. Shareholders are actively trying to destroy our wellbeing for profit.
From a credit union observor:
“Cooperatives are the future of our ecosystem. It is how we take care of each other, how we take care of our community, and it’s how we can create generational wealth for all of us moving forward without being a part of this really extractive system.”
The question: Do credit unions practice both these economic approaches for example in mergers?