I find Wall St. baffling for all the usual reasons, but this one is too rarely discussed.
Well, one question to ask is if the company can actually cash out their crypto holdings at the current market price? If they have substantial holdings of thinly-traded crypto, the answer is usually "lol".
Faith in the company matters too. You can't compel them to sell, and if you think the company is going to slowly drive itself into the ground, you probably don't want to give them your $$$. There are quite a few companies that traded below their book value for that reason. IIRC, Kodak is a current example. Want to bet on that?
1. https://unchainedcrypto.com/a-musk-style-reward-anthony-pomp...
Businesses (or parts of) can have negative value - still worked out pretty well for the execs there.
Consider the example of a person who has been trapped by a malevolent aggressor in some sort of detention they find miserable. The de facto prison that they live in is surrounded by barbed wire fences, snipers, and angry dogs.
They're considering whether or not they should try to run through those perils. A clever, urbane economist comes up to them and tries to explain to them about cost-benefit analysis, wants to talk to them about the expected value of their decision, and the chances of death and all of that, how to make a rational decision.
That person is a fucking idiot. Because, from the perspective of the person making the actual decision, it's a binary outcome: accept a life of unending misery or do something, anything, to improve it.
There is nothing at all irrational about running into almost certain death when imprisoned unjustly. And there's nothing irrational about extremely risky behavior when your current life is miserable and there aren't enough levers to pull to get out of it by other means.
For the most part, the kind of people who write those books find themselves very popular and well-supported by the kinds of people who build those prisons.
Advertising and availability. Sports gambling was limited to Vegas a decade ago, now you can lose thousands of dollars while fiddling with your phone on your toilet.
If every corner store and gas station had a heroin vending machine, you'd probably see a lot more opiate addicts, too, regardless of how well the economy is doing. And doubtlessly, their owners would screech to the skies at any attempt to curb that shit.
The equity part includes listed stocks: STRF, STRC, STRE, STRK, and STRD. Those are on the NASDAQ, not crypto exchanges. Here's a long discussion of Strategy's strategy.[2] They're leveraged, but the financing for the leverage is not from crypto markets, and has more strength behind it. The whole thing will come unglued if there's a prolonged drop in the price of Bitcoin, but they can ride through medium-length down periods. Strategy's various stocks have dropped more than the price of Bitcoin.
[1] https://cryptonews.com/news/strategy-reports-21b-raised-in-2...
[2] https://www.vaneck.com/us/en/blogs/digital-assets/matthew-si...
If you couldn't tell the majority of crypto influencers were foreigners before Twitter/X disclosed their location, I don't know what to tell you.
I agree the juxtaposition demonstrates how callous our society is - but would you agree that these are two entirely independent things, though? (i.e. we could have eliminated poverty while still having irrationally overpriced BTC; or maybe in the future when BTC's value eventually reverts back to 2 pizzas we will still have poverty and destitution.
There are posts there like this that make the point better than I can: https://www.reddit.com/r/IWantOut/s/g7L2i4OKyI
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpqreZlmHGU [video][7 mins]
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_o3nZHzCwA [video][4 mins]
Moreover, while the government can have a fairly significant impact on Wall St., ForEx, and on interest rates and worldwide financial markets (though in each of these cases, it seems that despite perhaps well-intentioned regulations, the norms and fraud, abuse, and predatory instruments), there are even worst second-order effects when huge governments attempt to meddle in areas where they can exert relatively little control, as exemplified by drug prohibition for example.
It's not obvious what banning crypto speculation might have - it will surely make crypto (and speculative crypto instruments) more valuable in some markets due to the smuggling risk - is that likely to be assistive to whomever you're trying to help?
Uh, sure. But this isn't a real political phenomenon. When concerns arise around power and wealth entrenchment, the solution has never been to reduce the state's power to regulate the economy.
I'm not sure why you believe that. For example, The fall of the Soviet Union - in some ways the most significant economic restructuring of the 20th century - was precisely that.