Battle For the Soul of Capitalism

I've been reading Bogle's book over the last week, and I've come to a conclusion ithat he writes around but doesn't actually hit on. That's that the real commodity in our economy is stock. The definition of stock as a representation of a piece of ownership in a corporation has changed, and that the ownership of stock, and the trading of stock is an economy unto itself. Not in the way that stock is traded on the expectation that partial ownership of a corporation engaged in a particular set of industrious actions will increase the price of the stock in the future, rather, there is a "deep branding" effect, where a perception of a fictional other's place in the market of stock trading effects the willingness of a stock owner to purchase at a given price. Deep branding in this case being something I've just made up which suggests a brand unawareness so embedded in any micro-culture that it becomes a pseudo fact.

All this is said in addition to Bogle's commentary on managers capital and municipal complacency.