The cause of all financial collapses is identical.

They involve the same mentality and the same psychology and the same kind of individual: people who produce nothing but try to get rich by manipulating other people's money.

There have been stock crashes, depressions, panics, bubbles, and other financial meltdowns since corporations first started raising capital by selling stock, for the same reason. And either they have never learned how to avoid them or they have and just don't want anyone else to know. Instead of using capital as a resource to generate more capital by facilitating employment, manufacturing, extraction and trade; they see it as an end in itself. "I'm in investments." What the hell does that actually mean, anyway?

If the amount of money being traded in capital markets grows while the industrial sector is essentially static, or is obfuscated by vague handwaving like "services" or "finance", this means there is more money chasing less goods. Isn't that what we would normally call inflation? Sooner or later it WILL catch up to you, fool, probably when you least expect it and can least afford it. Look around you. Not even the President of the Republic was able to postpone it until after the election.

The financial sector generates debt, it prints money. A small and controlled amount of this can be good, it keeps people busy and creates wealth, it acts as a flywheel or floodgate to provide a steady and dependable stream of capital for industry and allows us to borrow from the wealth we haven't created yet to help create wealth now. That's a good thing. But when the creation of non-existent capital becomes an end in itself, simply because it makes capitalists wealthy, then it is a crime and a perversion. These people have not only found a way to sell debt, they have found a way to make it profitable, at least in the short run.

Stock markets are the capitalist equivalent of government bureaucracies, they produce nothing except perhaps a useful but limited regulative and administrative function. They raise money not by taxation, but by the promise of delivering dividends and future rising stock prices. When the amount of "wealth" generated this way exceeds the amount actually produced by human labor, the system becomes addicted to growth, it becomes a Ponzi scheme, it has to or it caves in. When this phony wealth is invested back in the system you inevitably get a depression. Does any of this sound familiar yet?

And those who profit by this know this. When you tell them ( or those innocents who fancy themselves one of "them") this they roll their eyes and tell you that you "don't understand", or "don't know what you're talking about", or "Trust us, we know what we're doing", or my personal favorite, "You obviously have no understanding of the most basic principles of economics", while the house of cards they have constructed comes tumbling down all around them. Although sometimes they do get tangled up in their own arrogance and greed, they usually get away with it by having others come in and clean up the mess and pay the bills, This is why they loathe any attempt to regulate, or even to publicize, their activities. Not only do they not want you to know, they want to con you into thinking you are free to join them.

And for all you conservatives out there, this is not an attack on the free market or a plug for socialism. It's an attempt to communicate to you that this kind of financial activity has absolutely nothing to do with entrepreneurism or free enterprise. It is just the opposite.