Reminds me of this...
During Apple's 1980 Initial Public Offering (IPO), Massachusetts regulators banned residents from purchasing the stock. The state's securities regulators deemed the offering "too risky" and "over-valued," enforcing a state rule that prohibited IPOs with a price exceeding 25 times earnings.
> The investors who wanted to take more risk could do that.
What? How? By moving out of Massachusetts? I could understand banning such a speculative stock for e.g. pension funds or whatever, but blocking private individuals from buying with their own money seems insane.
Well we are far more corrupt and in the last stages of late stage capitalism. 15 day waiting period for Nasdaq 100. Your 401k is now the exit liquidty for the country's 5k richest people.
I really dont see how America doesnt collapse on the weight of its own corruption. But maybe the was the plan all along....
Just to put some numbers on it, under current rules and valuations, if all 3 of SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic were to go public with their current valuations and be part of the nasdaq 100, and you were 100% allocated to that, you’d have ~8% portfolio exposure to them. I suspect if you are the type of person who is 100% allocated to QQQ I’d guess you’d want _more_ exposure to those symbols than that.
For someone holding VTI its closer to 3% and a 2050 fund its more like 1.5%. Indexing is how most people are investing in their retirement accounts because controversies like these just don’t matter much. Hedging this off is going to cost more than its worth.
The stock market (and in particular the US stock market) has been an incredibly positive influence on the average American's 401k... Great driver of allowing Americans and beyond to share in the upside of successful companies... big reason why Americans can retire.
This is not a useful response to "how long does this last? I've been hearing it for a decade."
The phrase "late capitalism" itself has been used for just over a century now[0]; while I believe the USA is destroying what made the nation successful and will therefore probably[1] go into decline before 2035, there's no particular reason to tie the weird aspects of the economic system to the USA's political nonsense.
Also, the USSR would be the opposite example of your first sentence, as the collapse was a big surprise to everyone (both inside and outside the bloc) even a few years before it happened.
The Roman Empire would be the example for long-term decline, as that took one or more centuries depending on where you count the zenith (180 CE to 376 CE as the start, the Western Roman Empire was definitely dead by 476 CE).
But you seem to want to present it as a "in our lifetime" kind of thing; for that, I would suggest the British Empire, which peaked just before WW1, yet was obviously a broken power by the time of the Suez Crisis of 1956 just 42 years later though full decolonisation took longer (and if you ask Sinn Féin, Plaid Cymru, and the SNP, isn't really finished).
[1] There's a very narrow path where enough anti-corruption votes combine for a government which does something that, ironically, Trump promised in his first term: "drain the swamp". It can't just be "Dems win", it has to be broad consensus that not only takes this seriously but also is seen by the world to do so.
