It is hard to imagine the world without a stock market. Today, it is THE indicator of how well the economy is doing. (but really, it only tells how much of the money printing is flowing into it)
Now, imagine it is gone. And it is gone with extreme prejudice.
What happens between now and then, that will cause such?
Stuff! A LOT of stuff.
Right now, if the stock market dies, it is "How do we repair it? We got to get this fixed right away"
In the not to distant future, the stock market dies, and it is "What? About time. Should have had the plug pulled a decade ago"
We are playing musical chairs
There is only one problem with this game of musical chairs is that there are millions of people walking around, and there is only one chair, and it already has a fat bankster sitting in it.
In the game, there should be one less chair than people, but chairs have been secretly (because the MSM didn't report it) removed.
In the stock market, brokers have created "ghost shares". Selling stock while also reporting the stock as backing a short. Thus, the stock market now believes there are two shares, and this doesn't always get cleared. Slowly, there are more stocks traded than there are stocks.
When the music stops, we are going to find that no one owns any stock. Cede and Company owns all the stock. (unless you had the stocks transferred to you, AND registered that with the corporation legal.)
Of course the people will riot, and they will report that they will work out who owns what. And that will take years.
The music will stop, and a lot of retirees will have no "money" until after they kick the bucket.
Corporations are evil!
I do not know which realization happens first, but they come as a set.
Corporations can externalize costs, and internalize profits. And it is almost impossible to not do this. It is the very structure of what a corporation is. People are going to realize that this is evil.
Giant corporations are actually trying to destroy the planet. It is just "good business practice". Things like planned obsolescence, renting that which you already paid for, unrepairable goods, throw away economy… every one of these hurts the planet, destroys the environment. People will demand corporations stop doing this. Most corporations will ignore the people.
And then the people start manufacturing the things themselves. And then start ignoring corporations that are bad for the environment and people. Corporate sales go so low that they can't afford their fixed overhead. Without tons of printed money, they will all go out of business. And, if they don't the people will descend on them, and remove the corporation brick by brick. Their CEOs hanging from lampposts.
There are very few corporations who will survive this purge. Corporations, the legal entity, will not.
The plunge protection team is fired
The Fed will be closed, and the Plunge Protection team that lives within its walls will no longer be there to keep the market going up.
Without all that liquidity being injected, the market would be going down due to all the people retiring. And the market would continue going down. If this continued, there would be millions of people, who "own stock" and no one who will buy it from them. The stock P/E ratios are 10x too high for sustainability.
No one is investing in the stock market because they want to, or that it is a good investment. They are doing so because it is the only place you can invest. Everything else is losing to inflation.
Inflation is caused by money printing. But, that money printed finds its way into the stock market, making number go up. It is a horrifying cycle. There is very little organic money put into the market.
Even all the defined contribution plans are not enough to keep the market up. Soon, the market crashes. Not just from one source, but all the pillars are knocked out, and people see that there is no value there.
The stock market is going to crash, be closed due to fraud, be reopened on the blockchain, to never really recover (better to buy bitcoin), to losing all of its clients (corporations die), and then turning to dust. (no one wants to deal with something that was about corruption, stealing money from elderly, and destroying the planet)
We still have a little time left of stock market go up. But, it won't be that long. So, get out soon. Bitcoin will do better.
And, there is a possibility that stock market goes up forever, in FRNs. As hyperinflation, the loss of purchasing power of the FRN, has numbers going up, while value drops. How many trillion dollar Zimbabwe notes you want for that APPL stock?
The crumbling/destruction of the evil corporations is coming. It is inevitable. And that really puts paid to the final days of the stock market.