Tech billionaires are making plans to bail on California ahead a possible ballot measure that would tax their assets to help pay for healthcare.
Sources told the New York Times that venture capitalist Peter Thiel has explored spending more time outside California and opening an office for his Los Angeles-based personal investment firm, Thiel Capital, in another state.
I’ve seen the “one person selling lots of stocks in an otherwise healthy company to raise cash tanks the market” claim repeated so many places as one of these “everyone knows this, it’s obvious” facts, and yet it never seems to play out that way to any meaningful degree. It’s one of the many Big Lies of capitalism that we’ve just been tricked into accepting.
You might occasionally see a minor one day dip of a few percent at worst, and even then they’re usually caused by some underlying issue unrelated to one person’s need for liquidity.
Yeah it’s one of the classics. In reality, the rich liquidate stocks all the time, particularly large amounts might not always be able to be dumped on the market immediately in one go but well, then it’s simply done over a certain timespan, but generally speaking it takes quite a lot before the market “cares”.
I think it’s that a large pool of stocks going up for sale with no context seems suspicious. Stocks are inherently a gamble on the future price will be higher than current price, so by selling you’re withdrawing your bet which could be interpreted as you knowing that the bet won’t pay off and that other
gamblersowners paying attention might panic and try and sell too, which then could trigger a feedback loop. New buyers might see a bunch of people trying to sell and then think to themselves the bet isn’t a good one and won’t buy, making the current sellers reduce the price in the hopes of actually selling off and not left holding the bagA lot of “could” and "might* in that scenario, and it does play out from time to time (see NFTs, 2008 housing market). It also won’t play out if the reason for the sale is known and isn’t based on lost faith of the bet
Brilliant classic example of exception proving the rule. Both NFTs and the 2008 crash were caused by a massive lack of fundamentals, not irrational shareholder panic based on a few unknown selloffs, so the fact that those are the examples you came up with of big crashes just shows how weak the original claim was.
Apart from anything else, it doesn’t even stand on its own terms - if billionaires were required to pay wealth tax bills, then there wouldn’t be any mystery as to why they were selling their shares.
The taxes aren’t on one person though, they’re on everyone. Everyone looking to sell their stocks at tax time => price goes down because no one is looking to buy.
No. Obviously they wouldn’t wait en masse until tax time to sell on the same day. If you knew everyone was going to sell their stock at the same time, wouldn’t you sell yours first before the prices started plummeting? And by the same token, if you knew there was going to be a load of selloffs at the end of the tax year, wouldn’t you wait to do all your buying at that time?
There’s just way too many pressures in both directions for what you claim to be a plausible scenario.
If their portfolios were properly diversified, you wouldn’t see that effect on the overall market.