https://twitter.com/Tesseraconteur/status/976877487807516673

Interesting thread/discussion:

«fun fact: nestle owns the rights to a clean water source close to Flint, Michigan where children are being poisoned w lead contaminated water residents don’t get to drink the clean water bc it’s exclusively used to bottle Nestle’s most expensive brand»

So… Nestlé is publicly traded, so that means they answer to the stockholders, and the stockholders (the market, really) wants profit. And the stockholders are… teachers and firefighters. Think of the teachers and firefighters!

I posted on this a while ago: https://plus.google.com/+JohnLusk/posts/K5cfC8Pkvc9. (Article at Business Insider entitled “Here’s who actually owns the stock market”.)

And, finally, Nestlé is a foreign company, which adds more complexity to the picture. (Maybe?)

[Updates: clarifications, in case anybody ever shows up here to read this: I’m not saying that corporations are off the hook in terms of moral obligations, just that people should be aware of who they’re asking to pay when they ask corps to cough up. It’s essentially asking the shareholders to chip in, which is not necessarily unreasonable. I’m sure all those teachers and firefighters and software developers would be happy to give up a few pennies or even dollars to ensure clean, lead-free drinking water, especially considering the long-term societal impacts of lead.

Here’s some interesting data from https://www.brighthub.com/money/investing/articles/117044.aspx (I have no idea how reputable they are, but they sound good):

only 54 percent are currently invested in the stock market either by owning individual stocks or by holding them indirectly in mutual funds or as part of their IRAs or 401(k)s.

Americans are notorious consumers, which is good because consumer demand makes up 70% of the U.S. economy. Without consumer spending, corporations would not be able to generate profits. Without corporate profits stock prices would plummet and household wealth would erode causing a lost of consumer confidence and a further curtailment of spending. So consumption is an integral part of the wealth building cycle in America’s society. However consumption can also run amok with devastating consequences. This is what happened in 2005 when the American savings rate dipped into the negative territory—an early warning sign that a debt crisis was coming that would send the U.S. spiraling into the deepest recession since the Great Depression. Currently the U.S. savings rate has rebounded and leveled off to around a healthy 5.5% of disposable income. But this does not mean that Americans have bought stocks with those rainy day funds, instead they have chosen other investment classes that they perceive are safer, less volatile and more likely to have predictable returns.

Also:

According to the Federal Reserve’s most recent report, the median [emphasis mine — John L.] value of directly held stock in 2009, for families holding any, was approximately $12,000. This represented a decline of 36% from $18,500 reported in 2007 and was largely attributable to the stock market’s free fall and the cyclical unemployment that forced households to raid their savings.

https://www.cnbc.com/2014/09/08/the-stock-gap-american-stock-holdings-at-18-year-low.html:

The [Federal Reserve] survey [of Consumer Finance] said only 14 percent of Americans own stocks directly—down from 21 percent in 2001.

Also:

In 2010, the latest period available, the top 10 percent of Americans by net worth held 81 percent of all directly held or indirectly held stocks, according to Edward N. Wolff, an economics professor at New York University who specializes in inequality and Federal Reserve data.

Wolff said that share—which has not been released yet for 2013—has probably gone even higher than 81 percent since 2010.

WSJ (https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/10/27/who-owns-stocks-its-not-just-the-rich/):

Only the highest-earning families, however, are upping their ownership. In the 1990s, families at all levels were increasingly entering the market. But since 2001, only the highest earners are more likely to own stocks. Even families in the 80th to 90th percentile—earning an average of $123,000 a year, according to the Fed data—have exited the market.

Families in the 20th to 80th percentile have been the most likely to leave, with 4% to 9% fewer families in each of those ranges owning stocks than in 2001, at the peak of the dot-com bubble. That may sound like modest movement, but consider:

That works out to about 1.7 million families in the 60th to 80th percentile who have left the market. About 1 million families in the 40th to 60th percentile who left the market. And about 2.1 million families in the 20th to 40th percentile who have left the market.

Many of those families likely had no choice, as economic upheaval in the form of the 2001 and 2007-09 recessions may have left many people in dire need of cash when the market was down. Stock ownership in the U.S. remains widespread, but many families have been squeezed or spooked out of the market at precisely the moment it’s done so well.

Ok, so there’s a problem. The stock market is Good, but not enough people are invested in it, for whatever reason, so stock-market health is irrelevant to many, many people. Except for the indirect implication that overall economic health has for employment, which might be what people really mean when they say “the stock market is doing great”? Some might say that if you want money, you should get on the money train, but we do have some sort of obligation to keep people from starving or dying of illness when it’s easily preventable. (I’ll have another post on that topic at some point in the future, I’m sure. Something along these lines: https://plus.google.com/+JohnLusk/posts/Ei5iw5RAX6e)

(Updates end.)]