This is not a political question; the title of the article is grounded in mathematics and thus immutable truth.
Let's take a "mainline" business such as Kroger (KR); they sell, of course, groceries. They've been doing so for a very long time and have a "Market Cap", or what the market price of a share of stock is times the number of shares out, of $34.5 billion at present.
Their "trailing" P/E (last four quarters) is 31.65. This means that for every dollar of earnings after expenses the market trades a share of their stock for $31.65. P/E goes up and down with price and earnings and is determined by the stock market every day as people make decisions to buy or sell. The current net profit margin of the company is 0.73%; in other words they must sell $137 worth of merchandise to generate one dollar of actual profit after paying for the food, transportation, power bill in the building, rent or depreciation on the building, labor, etc.
Incidentally this looks pretty terrible from a standpoint of business performance (net profit margin) but for a grocery store it's pretty normal and has been for decades.
You therefore must destroy any corporation that engages in fraud in each and every instance and you must further impose criminal penalties on the people who work for and with said firms, most-particularly all of their directors and officers, asset-stripping them to their underwear and throwing them in prison at minimum. Indeed it is entirely-reasonable to argue, given the society-destroying effects if this is ever allowed to compound (and it has) that this must be a federal death penalty offense for any officer or director so-involved.
If you don't treat it that harshly then every company will steal if there is any capacity to do so because it is one hundred times more profitable to steal than to operate an honest business. Then, having stolen last quarter the market expects more stealing because that theft goes into their profit and it is literally impossible to better the margin on theft by developing more and better actual products and services. At a ratio of 100:1 there will never be a case where stealing is not the only way to keep up with "market expectations" for any public company once the first instance of such fraud occurs and is not immediately stomped on. Both the tech bubble and housing bubble and their resulting crashes came about for this exact reason.
The entire stock market rides today on said fraud and it has been compounding now in this regard for more than a decade in health care alone which is exactly how it got to be this large.
Guess who pays for the theft by fraud?
You do.
It is in every thing you buy and it is extracted from you by force.
This is also why we are in the Mother Of All Bubbles (MOAB) and guess what will come next.....
