Hey, I didn't read the Wiki article either. I just know that you tend to like them.

If there is a huge interest in short term profits these days and buying and selling company stocks as a way to make quick cash, I don't think many shareholders are too concerned about what happens to a company a year or so down the road as long as they can get their cash and get out before it's too late.

mk might be able to find the data - I'm about to get on a plane - but something like 70% of "traders" on the market right now are algorithms, in the form of ETFs. There is no algorithm written that gives a fuck about where GM will be seven years from now. That's another beef against the market as it exists: we're highly refining the behavior of a model that is increasingly divorced from real-world inputs and outputs.

I keep hearing "soft recession" and "quantitive easing" thrown around (I have a pretty good idea of what the first term means and half an idea of what the second term means). Could it be we're in an era kind of like the '70s? Only this time the stagflation is caused by something else, we're at the ropes of trying to control inflation, and now China is the new Japan? If we're still using '80s finance tactics and we're facing all this trouble, whatever new solution we come up with might be more drastic and even more dangerous.

You have again found the horns of the dilemma. Keep in mind there are several schools of economic thought and they all hate each other to varying degrees. Ben Bernanke basically made his bones studying the Great Depression and the one thing he knew the US didn't need in 2008 was a "liquidity trap" whereby people who needed money couldn't borrow it. Thus all the money injected into the market (HBO has a great dramatization of this if you're interested).

However, lots of people thought Bernanke was wrong. Lots of people think Bernanke was right . Lots of people don't even know what they're thinking. It's inherited knowledge that Friedman thought FDR's New Deal prolonged the Depression, despite what you learned in US History in high school, but even that opinion is controversial.

So I don't have any answers for you. But I will tell you that financial pundits that charge $600 a year for their newsletters ask and answer your above question, ad nauseum, rarely coming up with the same results.

I'm gonna read more up on Benefit Corporations cause they sound like a real good idea worth looking into.

Somewhere or other I mention that Hubski should look into being a B-corp, but I'm about to board.