“We were good
We were gold
Kind of dream
that can’t be sold
We were right
’til we weren’t
Built a home
and watched it burn”
“Flowers” - Miley Cyrus

The opening stanza of the 2023 megahit for Miley Cyrus discusses the end of a relationship and the inevitable regret, questioning, and even self-worth anxiety that come from the end of a relationship. Then, Cyrus’ lyrics turn on a dime, as she realizes that she can take care of herself and doesn’t need someone else to prop her up.

“Flowers” was Cyrus’s second No. 1 song, and it spent eight weeks on the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The song actually broke a record, spending 57 weeks on top of Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart, making it the longest-running song atop any of Billboard’s genre-focused airplay charts in its history.

Cyrus won 18 awards for the song, including Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance. When asked about the tune in an interview, Cyrus opined, “A lot of people have heard their story in it. For me, it’s about taking ownership of your own circumstances and not letting the world happen to you.”

Ownership is a very precarious thing in our modern world. Do you own the land your house sits on? Go a summer without cutting your grass, and you’ll quickly find that the city charges you for not maintaining your own property.
Do you think you own your vehicle? Miss a few payments on your house or your credit cards, and you’ll quickly find out that your paid-off vehicle now has a lien of ownership to someone else.

That leads us to the most precarious ownership that has been normalized in our world - stocks and the stock market.

This article by no means should be considered an expert opinion on investments or even investment advice. I’m simply a guy providing background research on a topic.

The stock market has many origin stories, but the most widely accepted story dates back to 12th-century France, when bankers traded agricultural debts. The first law related to a stock exchange came from Italy in 1351.

In other words, some aspect of a securities exchange has existed for nearly a millennia. However, as often happens, once this idea got to America, it morphed into something significantly different.

The stock market that began in the colonies formed around the new idea that a piece of paper could be issued declaring a portion of ownership of a company. Previously, legal arrangements set up multi-owner relationships with companies, and you simply couldn’t sell or trade those agreements. This new idea of ownership of a “share” of a company is a foundational idea of modern capitalism.

It’s also the foundation of a lottery, but we’ll come back to that.

While there are many items that are moved on a “stock exchange,” we’re going to focus primarily on ownership stock, pieces of paper in the past, now a digital representation, that states your slice of ownership in a particular company.

Microsoft is celebrating 50 years of business this year. Let’s say at their initial public offering, the first time a business’s ownership pieces of paper are available for the public to purchase, you bought two shares of Microsoft stock, and they were worth $10 apiece. Two years after you purchased, Microsoft sees that they need to raise some money for the business, so they can do what is called a stock split. Suddenly, your two shares of the company are four shares (using a two-to-one split in this example), but your overall value hasn’t changed, so if the price of the shares had jumped to $15 per share, you don’t suddenly have $60, you still have $30, split four ways instead of two.

This level of “ownership” by stockholders has given many the feeling of input into the day-to-day operations of a business. If you don’t like what Microsoft is doing, you should have a direct line to make a statement - after all, you’re a part-owner of the company, right?!

Societally, we’ve begun to feel as if we’re supporting any organization through a membership fee, a subscription, or an annual giving pledge, we have a say in what is being done by that organization or business. In large part, this goes back to the promise of how stocks are supposed to work but bled out into many other areas of the economy.

In general, it gives everyone a voice and no one the power to do anything about it. Companies set up representative boards with elected (or appointed) members to represent the stockholders with upper management of the company in order to prevent a company’s CEO from dealing with 40,000 stockholder emails and phone calls each day.

This model has removed the service provider/customer relationship and created a power dynamic in play in any business between the provider and the customer, who also assumes a level of ownership based on expectations of return from any money spent.

The stock market has turned into a way to secure your long-term retirement, something that the company once provided through a pension plan for long-time workers. This week, we saw the fallacy of focusing any funds that you expect to return to you in a market of “owners” all attempting to max out every single dollar. Many people’s retirement accounts are in significantly worse shape today than they were on the first of the month.

In reality, putting money down in the hope that it will grow without any true ability to influence that growth is exactly what people do when they gamble or when they play the lottery, but no financial investor would tell you to invest all of your savings into Powerball.

More than anything, the stock market requires someone else out there to say that the piece of paper you hold is worth something.

Why would this be a topic that I’d spend a thousand words talking about?

We don’t print the Sunday Associated Press almanacs in our weekend edition, but this Sunday’s lead item is from April 6, 1917, when the United States officially entered World War I. After the war ended in 1918, the United States saw tremendous economic growth because we were one of the few in the world with functional production capabilities.

Once Europe rebuilt and recovered, they began to produce their own goods again and didn’t need the same volume of American goods, leading eventually to the collapse of the stock market in 1929. The response of the government wasn’t to evaluate how to be a better global trade partner to provide more value to those pieces of paper held by so many in the country. It was to add significant tariffs in 1930, the Snoot-Hawley Tariff Act, and (Buehler? Buehler?) those tariffs drove the economy further down, leading to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

History may not purely repeat itself, but it frequently rhymes. So, for now, buy yourself flowers, because who knows what could be coming soon.