[Anon1096]

Wealth is not in fact finite. If you take a piece of lumber and carve it into a dresser you've just generated wealth. Resources kind of are but not really, extraction takes it from unusable to usable and essentially creates it (also, trees literally grow out of the ground). Similarly Tesla has made a lot of cars that people drive and AI companies have created products that have hundreds of millions of DAU.

Whether that "justifies" the market prices is orthogonal, all the market price says is that people want to own a piece of the pie at the current price being offered. It can stay that high as long as there continue to be people interested in owning shares of the companies.

[shash]

Wealth is not finite, but it does have to obey physical limits and real world implications. If person A takes a piece of lumber and carves it into a dresser, and person B, seeing that, buys up lower quality lumber that cannot become a dresser, is that wealth generation? What then, of the guy who buys up lumber futures and dresser futures, on something that won't actually ever happen (say, those lumber futures are for trees that are completely not viable) and then claims to be creating wealth? And asking the stock market to value him on the basis of hype?

There's real wealth and there is all of the manipulation to drive up prices.

[ethbr1]

> If you take a piece of lumber and carve it into a dresser you've just generated wealth.

I'd make the note that you've converted raw materials and labor (and maybe some capital machinery/tools) into a finished good.

Whether the market will value that finished good at more than the sum of what you paid for its parts is a fair question though!

It's entirely possible to have net-unprofitable economic activities, especially in a bubble.