Well, no, not exactly. That's not how stock works. The only time a corporation benefits from a stock sale is the first time it happens, at dilutory events like public offerings (usually there is only one public offering, the IPO). When you buy stock in a company outside of an IPO, the corporation doesn't see any of that money. Unless a company is planning another public offering, or doing some seriously shady ****, the stock price is literally irrelevant for the actual (non finance goods) business operations of a corporation.
Other than that, you're on the right track.
We're in the middle of a god awful, 30 year long, maybe 40 year long stock market bubble. Stock price growth is absolutely ****ing insane right now. Average returns on S&P 500 stocks since 1980 are about 13% per year. That wildly outpaces any reasonable ROIC you can expect from doing anything "real" with that money.
Like, imagine buying a rental building and getting 13% of your land+construction costs back in rent, every year. That would be insane. Absolutely ****ing insane. You'd be lucky to get 4%. If you tried to get more than that, you'd get guillotined and piked. And not necessarily in that order.
Why would a rational person ever roll the dice on real capital investment, then, when they can just make an absolutely stupid amount of money buying stock? They wouldn't. So they do stupid **** like liquidate perfectly good companies, get their money out, and hurl it at the stock market. Everybody's stocks get bid up, they sell to the new suckers and bid up some other stock. Then all this **** bleeds over into housing and cars and every other damn thing.
It's all a complete house of cards. The worst part? Your deferred income savings account. Your 401(k) and RRSP, those little government bribes to get workers to keep feeding the bubble. Meanwhile the savings that people used to use to start businesses in their 40s and 50s are locked up in retirement plans for another 20-30 years longer, and spent in trickles to avoid the government tax bomb on them.
Money money everywhere, not a drop of wealth.
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