MMT is not about the stock market. By "tradables" I meant anything that can be traded for something else. Money merely measures the values of those tradable things, faciliting their exchange. It's quite a brilliant system, but a
useful awareness of how it works is severely lacking. Thus progress is blocked.
I watched the House Budget Committee hearing the other day. Shocking levels of ignorance were on display. Rep. Yarmuth, the chairman of the committee
responsible for setting the national agenda, explained that
he's learning his job on the job:
I didn't have much economics on my way through school, so I'm using my chairmanship to become educated.
Really inspires confidence, huh?
However...that brings up a question nagging me about the stock market:
The stock market is valued at around $30,000,000,000,000.
The M2 money supply is only about $15,000,000,000,000.
(M2 includes all savings accounts, along with all other deposit accounts (but excluding Treasury bonds & bills) plus cash bills & coins in the economy.)
The question, or questions, are:
How meaningful is a stock's value, really? And especially, in aggregate?
If American stockholders all decided to sell their stocks,
the money to buy it all doesn't exist. Besides, if everyone's selling, who would buy? (Perhaps "market makers"?—hm, not likely I think, not for any good price.) The stock prices would plunge.
How does this apply to, say, Jeff Bezos? If Bezos tried to liquidate all or most of his Amazon stock (i.e. sell it for dollars), the stock price would immediately begin to fall.
So is Bezos
really worth $60,000,000,000?
What does all this mean in terms of the "value" of a company as measured by its stock price? Are the business assets & activities represented by the stock market really so valuable that not even all the money in the United States could purchase them? Is it mostly manipulation (e.g. stock buy-backs)?
...Just sort of winging this question, anyone with better understanding of stock trading, valuations, etc. please jump in.