[qaq]

Are you sure paper wealth truly translates into world of atoms. The fact that market values some hypothetical future profits of TSLA at 270x current profits vs Ford 7x is cool but can you actually deploy a significant fraction of that into real physical world?

[SimianSci]

No, but I dont think it matters if wealth truly translates as a 1:1 relationship. What matters is that the wealthy specifically invest in the mobility of wealth itself. They will absolutely pay a premium to make the wealth move more easily from one place to another. Many will gladly pay $10 to make $5 more mobile, so to speak.

A prime example of this being many cryptocurrencies which can be argued are a means of making large sums of wealth more portable.

[conception]

https://www.dcfpi.org/all/how-wealthy-households-use-a-buy-b...

Yes they can get at that wealth, tax free at that!

[qaq]

Again to do what? at scale there are many physical constraints. You can't take physical resources used to create a 500M yacht and build 100 apartment buildings. Those crazy valuations exist in part because none really tries to convert any significant portion of that paper wealth into physical things.

[esrauch]

I'm not sure if I'm following this example. A 500M Yacht concretely uses a large amount of materials/engineers/building expertise, right? It's not the exact same skills as building apartments but it is concrete "atoms" in terms of materials, engineering, sweat labor, fuel. Those resources could be used on apartments.

It's not like there's a fixed number of naturally occurring megayachts around and the $500m price is a fiction that isn't fungible to be used on other things

It doesn't seem related to the "you have a trillion dollars on paper but that's mostly fiction" topic. The $500m yacht has been materialized to "atoms" and isn't on paper anymore.

[qaq]

Yep but if you take all that paper wealth and distribute it you aint getting much physical shit out of it. The yacht example is relevant for ratio of how even physically manifested rich people toys convert to real world things people care about. 250M NYC apartment only consumed physical resources enough to build 15 regular size homes and so on.

[conception]

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. What does it matter the actual physical atoms? A mole of gold costs more than a mole of carbon. How much you can “deploy” with 500m differs.

Maybe you’re trying to say if they actually liquidated their wealth to spend any sufficient fraction their paper wealth would disappear but that’s the point of pulling out the value without liquidating.

[qaq]

I am saying people imaging that significant portion of paper wealth could be converted into tangible things for regular people like housing, infra etc.

[conception]

This is actually pretty easy to get data on, e.g. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tax-cuts-are-primar...

There are many studies on the various tax cuts for the ultra wealthy and how that has (purposefully) starved the government and limited its ability to provide tangible things for its citizens.

And that’s ignoring all the various tax avoidance schemes.

[johnnyanmac]

Whatever the banks approve, I suppose. Buy out a street block, "invest" in a new company, acquire another company, etc.

Put it another way: I'd also have little to worry about if I could borrow 200k from the bank for a project. That'd basically be used to pay rent and get minimal equipment I'd never be approved for it, though.