#we_can_do_better — Public Fediverse posts

2026-05-08 03:13 PM

predatory capitalism

From their inception, primary and secondary markets were designed to extract wealth and distribute to already wealthy speculators. The government-backed Dutch East India Company issued shares to fund its brutally violent theft of indigenous resources and the secondary market in those shares, seen as dangerously speculative at the time, allowed wealth hoarders to have some distance from the violence. To this day, investment markets are designed for extraction and secondary market investors gamble with wealth at a remove from the on-the-ground consequences of corporate choices. It’s a design suited to the colonial era with subsequent refinements updating it for the modern one while leaving the logic of extraction intact.

#history #investment #markets #predatory_capitalism #we_can_do_better