hmm.

yeah my own hypothesis is that wall street is using the post-Covid retail stock trading surge as cover to do all kinds of blatently illegal shit

also they now have algo trading to hide behind and go when something weird happens. and like everything else, total deregulation and decay of the rules making capacity of the Empire has allowed the stock market, Civilization Golden Wonder of the Capitalist World, to effectively become another grift

weird how legalized sports gambling and it's total domination of that entire space also perfectly synced up with this new market (also another great cover for fuckery)

obviously like you said it's not just post-2019/meme stock that created this mess it goes back to 2008 and further. it's just that has added this element of randomness and given the FTC the excuse of "welp it's just so many regular people fucking up the market so guess we can't do anything about it you want us to lock up 10 million robinhood grindset traders?" "honestly we'd love to lock everyone up but we need some of these people"

meanwhile the last of the wealth is exacted by the financial sector and any corporation that represents the national bougoinoise productive or extractive sector is slowly dismantled using the market (shorts, etc) as a weapon for private equity to swoop in, buy up, sell for parts, and move on

the private equity firms are the very thing creating their wealth from the pure grift.

love when capitalism eats itself. not sure if your solution is the correct one (metals, etc) but there's no conventional wisdom anymore. i mean at least that's based on a real physical value. i suppose investing in China or BRICS could be another but good luck if the U.S. decides to start it's economic war and you lose your investments