it's so much more than stocks. stocks are mostly vibes and short term get rich schemes for already wealthy people. they're Pokemon cards for the finance class, creating almost nothing tangibly beneficial to society. hype and FUD in an endless cycle.
you can't eat stocks. you can't warm your house with stocks. you can't manufacture solar panels with stocks.
real wealth, the serious fuck you Big Money, depends on the ownership and distribution of real resources: real estate, agricultural land, factories, pipelines, commerical buildings, capital infrastructure. these are what the ultra wealthy buy up during recessions and then charge rents and leases for everyone else to pay, forever. forget about owning land or a home, your kids can't compete with someone paying cash on a 600k house or snatching up entire portfolios of hundreds of rentals in a single purchase.
bailouts and blank checks given out as PPP loans to "business owners" during Covid redistributed wealth from the taxpayers (government) into the hands of the wealthiest people in the world. they can then convert their Pokemon collections into real wealth generating resources. government bailouts to corporations become an engine for not just making the rich richer but the types of assets they then acquire using that money cements them at the top of the wealth generation food chain forever.
Trump 2.0 is engineering another massive redistribution, even bigger and more focused on real estate than before. he made his fake reputation on real estate. loyalist oligarchs who bank rolled dark maga will be handsomely rewarded with the newly emptied government office buildings and public lands.
and your kids and grandkids will be homeless.
i think the commenter is just baffled at how drastically overvalued (over hyped) so many stocks are - a well known problem where speculative over investment can and does distort the whole economy and has power over the whole population. see for example, speculation bubbles like the dotcom overvaluation or subprime mortgages, or Theranos, or Bitcoin, or even how Tesla stock was being traded higher than the next 6-8 major car companies combined.
in other words, stock prices are a bunch of bullshit.
stocks arent exactly the same as "money" in the common sense so it confuses people when headlines say money was lost or wiped out. but stocks are similar to money in that they are placeholders for value, however much more susceptible to wild devaluations. because ultimately they're just speculative bets on what something is worth and can fluctuate rapidly, as rapidly and suddenly as human emotions.