Originally Posted by pepe View Post
Originally Posted by Bob21 View Post
The reason most businesses treat their employees decently is because this is the best way to retain the top talent, which does guess what? Makes the most money for their shareholders.
Not always, and that business model doesn't do what shareholders really want. It is not enough in the shareholder model to make a steady profit. What the shareholder model needs is GROWTH, which means MORE profit every year. Eventually what many businesses have to do to achieve this is cut costs. Generally this involves a loss of quality, but there is a lag time before the customer notices, if at all. Ideally, the shareholders sell during this lag time before the profits and share prices fall and leave some other sucker holding the bag for when the bubble bursts.
Of course, not always. Businesses are run by people and people are fallible, make mistakes, and yes there are some bad people in our country. So all business aren't going to make the right decisions all the time. The good news is poorly run companies go bankrupt, and well run ones usually don't. Well run companies treat their employees decently and pay more so they do better. Contrary to what liberals think, the profit motive is the primary motive for why companies treat employees well.

But as far as what Shareholders want...they want profit, as much profit as possible. They really don't care if the company is a growth company or not. That is why we invest in the stock market...to make money. People who pick individual stocks try to find the ones that will make them the most money. Sometimes these are growth stocks, sometimes they are not...they are dividend stocks. I don't know how much you know about stocks or companies but by your post, it doesn't appear like much.

As far as companies cutting costs (which I'm assuming you mean laying people off), this usually happens when a company is making something the market no longer wants. This happens in a dynamic market. We all know what happened to the stagecoach companies. They went out of business when cars came into play. Blockbuster went by the wayside because people no longer rent videos. But what about amazon? It keeps expanding and hiring more people. This is what happens when a company is making or doing something the market (us people) want.

I can see you have a liberal perspective of the stock market. You need to understand it goes up in the long run. If you buy and hold, no one will be left to hold that bag (as you said, we don't want any sucker holding any bag. lol). Everyone will be a winner! If you follow this strategy, you will have made more during any time period over any other asset, real estate, gold, bonds, etc. The key is don't try to time the market. Invest some money every year (really every month - that's what I do) during your lifetime and you'll become a very wealthy person.

Btw,do you and Midwest Player live close together? It doesn't look like either one of you understand basic economics or how companies work.