Investing

Who do you think truly owns any company?

Once upon a time, a million years ago, a store was arranged as so: a man, or woman, walked to a pond, collected some fish, then handed five to their friends/strangers and kept one for themselves. That was considered business. Why? Because they served a core purpose of the community. Thy were the fisherman. Their pay was the concept that the people who received the fish, did not try to kill them to get the fish they kept for themselves. Hence, they ended the day as someone with food in their mouths, and good standing within whatever social circle they operated in, aka tribe/village.

Now we have something different. I say it is different because the concept of business has morphed. It has become a gift, a trick, a con. Lots of businesses are old coins, like banking, where interest rates and fees are constantly played with so clients and other associates cannot keep up with the constant math tricks, or they are deep, deep, deep cons, like the oil industry, as if solar power or organic fuel has not been possible and preferable for the environment for centuries now, and quite possible as well. But here we are, in 2019, and most cars and planes and anything that moves quickly from Point A to Point B requires fuel drilled from the earth, which is incredibly damaging, but incredibly profitable.

I have had a very damaging illness for quite a while, called bipolar disorder. As a child I had one set of medications. Then I was switched to another. Then I was switched to another. Why? Well, there is no true proof, but over the past 27 years I have noticed one obvious thing about this experience. The number of pills I must take has gone up, their cost has gone up, and their effectiveness has gone down. So now we have centered on the two main cons in the USA because they are the ones most worth talking about, big oil and big pharma and the investing behind them.

What do you do when you want to start a new oil company? Well, you collect money. You run around the globe, telling sheiks and captains of industry that you have a great new idea for how to create energy, whether it be some new battery or some new drilling techniques like fracking, or maybe a way to just transport something we already have, like transporting natural gas by boat once it has been liquefied and then sending it around the world so poor countries can benefit from your product. Then, after this process and your company is complete and successful, you and your investors will reap incredible profits. Well, here is where the con, the trick, the rub is revealed. There is one single and solitary investor behind all of this, and it is not even the founder of the company, or the investors who have put out the millions or billions to get all of this running, and this is who it is.

It is the bank. It is the investment bank who has simply accepted the paperwork, scanned it or had its AI scan it, done a few algorithms, and declared that the creation of the company and mix of investors and the product it would pump out, was worth the risk to the bank just to process the transaction. Now, you would think that 9 times out of 10, the bank says, oh, of course, our server closet (they aren’t using actual people anymore) agrees this brilliant and proven founder and leadership team has a great idea and we should process the transaction. But, sadly, that is not how it works. If the investment bank decides this idea is junk, the investment never occurs, the company never occurs, the money never changes hands, the founder goes back to the drawing board, and absolutely nothing happens.