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A comment on After rising for 100 years, electricity demand is flat. Parent comment

Re:After rising for 100 years, electricity demand is flat by tboyd47 on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @11:34AM (#16475040)
Americans expect all major public companies' growth to continue indefinitely because financial advisors have told generations of people that their life's savings is guaranteed to grow on a steady curve forever as long as it's in the stock market, and they leverage their wealth accordingly, because it's the "financially sound" thing to do. This is why any time a major public company can't continue increasing profits, it becomes a national crisis and the government has to step in to save them.

I once remarked to an older family member (Boomer generation) that no investment is ever "guaranteed" to make money, and they corrected me immediately, appalled that I would even say such a thing. "Guaranteed" investments are the common sense of their generation. I invest prudently in funds that grow modestly but stably; of course my investments are going to keep growing. Why wouldn't they?

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Re:After rising for 100 years, electricity demand is flat by redial on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @11:45AM (#16475168)
Why wouldn't they indeed. Isn't the point of a fund to have consistent "infinite" growth? Companies fail all the time, but the job of the fund manager is to anticipate or mitigate those losses with new companies/investments.
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Re:After rising for 100 years, electricity demand is flat by hueving on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @02:16PM (#16476857)
>This is why any time a major public company can't continue increasing profits, it becomes a national crisis and the government has to step in to save them.

This is completely false. Where in the world did you get this idea?

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Re:After rising for 100 years, electricity demand is flat by tboyd47 on Wednesday February 28, 2018 @08:38AM (#16482858)
"Any time" is hyperbole, but the bank bailouts and car manufacturer bailouts were major lessons for me about how American society really works.

I also hear this kind of sentiment a lot in the Net Neturality wars. "The cable companies can't make money off of TV anymore," therefore, the laws of society have to change.

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Re:After rising for 100 years, electricity demand is flat by hueving on Friday March 02, 2018 @07:57PM (#16507122)
So "any time" = one time then. The financial crisis is hardly a recurring event.
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Re:After rising for 100 years, electricity demand is flat by skybrian on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @11:56AM (#16475318)
Theoretically, in the steady state where revenue and profits are fixed, the stock price wouldn't go up but you could reinvest the dividends. Whether this is a good investment depends on the profit margin.

In the real world, the average lifespan of a company in the S&P 500 is under 20 years. [1]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/technology-killing-off-corpo...

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Re:After rising for 100 years, electricity demand is flat by jonknee on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @12:49PM (#16475919)
You're reading that stat incorrectly:

> "The average age of a company listed on the S&P 500 has fallen from almost 60 years old in the 1950s to less than 20 years currently,"

The reason for that is there have both been a lot of mergers and a lot of new companies that have gotten huge in a small amount of time, especially in tech (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, NVIDIA, etc).

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