288
this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2026
288 points (97.1% liked)
No Stupid Questions
50586 readers
493 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Stock valuation has always seemed like play/imaginay money to me. Until I sell my stock and buy that large purchase, I treat mine like just a number.
Imagine you're the richest person on the planet, and own 1 trillion monies in stock of Omnia Corporation. Can you buy 1 trillion ice cream cones for 1 money each? No, because you can't sell 1T stocks without utterly devastating the stock price… But you sure can take a loan backed by this imaginary money. Boggles my mind.
I wish someone with economics background would correct my thinking.
I don’t have economics background and think the same way as you do.
They just create money out of thin air.
Same with money. If the power goes out the can of tuna in the cupboard suddenly is worth more dead president paper. Maybe it was worth a dollar yesterday. But 2 weeks into no power I won't sell it to you for 5 dollars.
The tuna in the refrigerator, on the other hand, is suddenly worth less. Where's the consistency?
You're not wrong, except the part where the money becomes more real once you sell the stock. All assets are like this -- if you lasso an asteroid that contains $45 umptillion of gold, you won't be able to sell it for $45 umptillion because you'll crash the gold market. Money has the same problem -- when the money supply grows, everyone has less money per money, which we call inflation.
Dollars, dollars everywhere and not a cent to spend.
I have a bachelors in economics and your pretty close except you’ve got realize that all money is like this. If you’ve got a us greenback in your pocket and if I decide it worthless to me, and you want something from me then all you’ve got is a small piece of art.
All value is just agreements between people and money is just a method of keeping track of favours owed that we worked out thousands of years ago. In the example of a stock, all a stock is, is an agreement between the company that issues it and its holder, that the company will do you a favour (give you some money, a dividend) some time in the future, and keep doing it every time they have some extra favours to hand out.
I may decide that the promise of those future favours are worth doing a lot of favours right now or only a few.
Right now everyone who buys and sells stocks doesn’t think a lot of companies aren’t going to be able to a lot of favours in the future so the value in the stock market has gone down. But that doesn’t mean a trillion dollars has disappeared it just means that the offer of money is lower
My simplified take is all money is commoditized promises. It works if people believe they will work. Doesn't if they don't.
To be fair the very idea of value of money is "imaginary". Even a bank note is nothing more than a promise.
The value of a stock is derived from the trust that someone will trade you for it. If the trust goes away, so does the value.
Similarly, the value of a bank note is derived from the trust that someone will trade you for it. If the trust in a bank (bank run) or government (scarce money supply, solvency) or economy goes away, so too will the value of money, i.e. inflation.
Even comodities and tangible goods have "imaginary" value, because these things can be under or over produced, which in turn changes how likely someone might want your good.
That being said, the degree of imagination needed to trust the value of trade varies, and stocks are definitely close to the top of the imagination tree.
A good currency serves two purposes: a good medium of exchange (easy to transact, easy to find someone willing to accept it in exchange for goods and services) and a stable store of value (worth ~the same yesterday as today). They are distinct purposes.
You're describing the former (finding someone to trade with) but actually talking about the latter in your point about "imaginary value" of money (as distinct from stocks). So I'd offer a small addendum about the value of money being imaginary: the guarantor of a currency plays a huge role in making the value real, in the sense that they are obligated to accept it when you use it to pay taxes.
Likewise commodities like gold are a somewhat stable store of value (disregarding supply shocks for the moment) in the sense that if everything goes to shit you can use them to make shiny baubles (or semiconductors).
Notably this is not the case for stocks, which is why stocks aren't a good currency. (Also why crypto isn't a good currency but more like a stock).
The difference with stock being that if you have 1T monies, you can buy stuff worth 1T (after ice cream cones run out, buy a factory or switch to candy). With 1T of stock, you can't.
No, but you can take a 2T loan using the 1T stock as collateral, and buy more things with the promise you buy it back.
And you can even use the 2T loan to buy out competitors or otherwise invest in that 1T of stocks. And when it's worth 2T borrow 5T to pay off the loan and have 3T to invest.
You don't need a business degree to know you are correct here. Someone whom may or may not be I has one though, and you are correct.