[gmerc]

They have been conditioned to become greedy. That’s how the system works.

You need to continually show growth. Actual profits don’t matter, it has to be expressed as growth.

The first one to blink loses as money flows out of the stock. So right now everyone is squeezing their business to avoid showing flagging growth. Jacking up prices.

Because investors only need growth, it doesn’t need to be sustainable - if there’s a general market correction that’s fine but you don’t want to be the one starting it.

Look at google. Ads is clearly on its last legs as a growth model but but aggressively pushing all levers like a cable company adding more and more ad breaks, they create the impression that things are still growing while gesturing at AI in hopes investors see the future growth there. No metric here measures the advance to the tipping point where customers abandon you to an alternative and they are not used to there being alternatives.

The current earnings season doesn’t show business health, they show greed dynamics.