America's biggest companies are quietly "buying themselves" and this is sending stock prices and wealth soaring on paper and this is because your money's value is collapsing faster than it ever has.
This financial engineering process is called buybacks: it's where, plain and simply, companies buy their own stock.
It's nothing new, companies do it all the time, but why they're doing it RIGHT NOW should scare you and you need to start preparing for what's next.
US companies have announced over $1 trillion in buybacks YTD, the fastest pace to reach that milestone on record.
In July, announced share repurchases totaled $166 billion, the highest on record for that month.
In May and April, Apple and Alphabet announced $100 billion and $70 billion in share repurchases.
On top of that, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America, each announced buybacks of at least $40 billion.
And just recently, Wall Street darling, Nvidia, announced a $60 billion buyback.
Companies aren't investing in growth or paying workers more. They're engineering a market "high" by shrinking the supply of their own stock, making prices soar even as underlying value stagnates or falls.
As the Fed prints money and inflation quietly devours purchasing power, all this "paper wealth" buys less and less. The result? A deceptive boom: a Bull Crash, where everyone looks richer but ends up poorer in real terms.
Wall Street and Washington are silent because they profit from the illusion. The middle class is being lured into a trap: you feel wealthier as your portfolio swells, but when you go to spend or retire, you discover you've become a "starving millionaire": rich on paper, broke in reality.
