We Are Poor Because We Are Morons

The king of crypto assets plunged—below $90,000—this week in late 2025.

From promises of effortless riches to Bitcoin’s trillion-dollar swings, financial markets turn uncertain. It then reveals the extraordinary concentration of global wealth and asks who truly benefits when markets rise or collapse.

Pay attention, because I’m not the one saying it: the “serious” press is—the financial press. In other words, it must be true.

Not long ago, Bernard Arnault, France’s richest man, invited anyone and everyone to invest the paltry sum of 250 euros with him and a group of experts, in order to earn a thousand euros a day and as much as 30,000 a month. How do you like that? If you’re still slogging away for a lousy wage, there’s no hope for you! You’re a moron. How and in what would Bernard Arnault invest your money…? He didn’t say. Some secrets are guarded more closely than the recipe for the Chartreuse de Parme.

A 43° or 55° liqueur produced by the monks at the Aiguenoire distillery in Isère, France. In less than fifteen years, Chartreuse doubled its sales (around 2 million bottles a year), and demand exceeds supply… A rare thing in the alcohol business, which has been hit hard by the crisis. Rarer still is the decision not to increase production. In 2022, Dom Dysmas, superior of the Grande Chartreuse monastery, preferred to keep it stable. Praise be!

Now then, in its November 19 issue last year, the Paris daily Le Figaro published the following.

Open your eyes and pay attention:

Every year, thousands of euros quietly evaporate. They do not disappear because of a stock-market crisis: they vanish as a consequence of individual decisions made by numerous savers who fall victim to cognitive biases (sic). Here is how to identify them so that you can combat them more effectively.

When it comes to saving, your main adversary is neither the fluctuation of financial markets nor your bank and its fees, nor even the government and its taxes, but your own brain. Without realizing it, you are probably, like many savers, a victim of “cognitive biases”: shortcuts our brains choose in order to move faster, but which distort our judgment and lead us to make bad decisions.

It couldn’t be clearer. You’re the moron, along with your cognitive biases, theorized by researchers Daniel Kahneman (winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Economics) and Amos Tversky, who were not economists but… psychologists! The fact that Le Figaro said it was enough to make it believable. And now… if a damn Nobel laureate in Economics says so…

The only consolation is that there is no shortage of morons like you. The next day, November 20, 2025, Les Échos, the Paris financial weekly, showed just how many there were:

Bitcoin drags the crypto market down with it: more than one trillion dollars goes up in smoke.

Bitcoin is unable to climb back above $90,000, fueling fears of a bearish crypto market. It has already lost more than one trillion dollars in market value since early October, when bitcoin set its latest record. As you can see, cognitive biases are wreaking havoc even among the professionals (one hesitates to call them that, since the feminine version, “professional women,” is engaged in a different line of work).

The weekly Les Échos is merciless toward bitcoin, an asset (?!) backed by nothing except cognitive biases. Take a look:

The markets are nervous, and bitcoin is giving investors cold sweats. The king of crypto assets fell below $90,000 this week, briefly dropping to $88,522 before a slight rebound.

In little more than a month, over one trillion dollars in market value went up in smoke, bringing the sector’s total capitalization down to around $3.2 trillion from $4.3 trillion at the beginning of October, according to Bloomberg. Bitcoin, which alone accounts for 57% of the market, has seen its valuation fall to around $1.82 trillion.

What Les Échos does not tell you is that, during this brief bout of dysenteric diarrhea, the players in this farce lined their pockets. Think for a moment about your money managed by the pension fund administrators. When that money is sent to Wall Street, the fund administrators and the banks collect a modest fee for doing you the favor. Then, when your money is invested on Wall Street in assets traded on the stock exchange, the buy orders (and/or sell orders) also carry a cost. If the purchased assets rise in price… you have earned something, after deducting the commissions charged by brokers, banks, and pension fund administrators. If you were unlucky enough (so to speak) for them to buy crypto assets with your money… Do I need to paint you a picture?

What are cryptocurrencies? What backs them? Their existence is purely digital—a series of bits, or bytes if you prefer, recorded on some computer—and their backing is the same as the dollar’s: none. Their valuation depends on which way the wind is blowing and/or on the confidence each investor places in the invention:

After the euphoria sparked by Donald Trump’s election, the upward momentum that had carried the asset from January to $126,000 suddenly stalled. The cycle rested on two pillars: the idea that the Federal Reserve (the American central bank) would cut rates several times in 2025, increasing the liquidity available for risky assets; and the rise of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, which had made it easier for institutional investors to enter the market. The arrival of these products had triggered a simple mechanism: steady, regular inflows fueled demand, reinforcing the feeling that the rise would continue.

Do you see the irrationality? As long as the gullible keep buying… the asset’s price rises. Until a stock-market panic breaks out, and then everyone bolts with a single thought in mind: every man for himself, because the last one out will be left holding utterly worthless paper. A trillion dollars goes up in smoke in less time than it takes to light a joint.

Maurice Allais, a respectable economist—which is saying something—had described it in 1999 in his work “The Worldwide Crisis of Today”:

The fact that stock exchanges have become veritable casinos, where gigantic poker games are played, would ultimately be of no importance—some win what others lose—if the general fluctuations in prices did not, through their consequences, generate profound waves of optimism or pessimism that exert a considerable influence on the real economy (…). The present system is fundamentally uneconomic and detrimental to the proper functioning of economies. It can benefit only very small minorities.

To get an idea of who belongs to that minority, Thomas Piketty’s World Inequality Lab carried out a careful study that produced results you already know, or ought to know. They were published throughout the world. Take a look:

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Today, the wealthiest 0.001% of the world’s population, fewer than 60,000 multimillionaires, controls three times more wealth than half of humanity. The wealth of this minority has grown by an annual average of 8% since the 1990s. This trend “has continued to intensify, highlighting the persistence of inequality.”

(Le Monde, Paris, December 10, 2025)

Sixty thousand privileged people, the equivalent of the population of a town such as Coyhaique, Los Andes, or San Fernando, possess three times more wealth than half the planet’s population: 3.6 billion poor suckers (China and India combined barely reach 3 billion).

Picture explanation nasdaq; The garden where the 60,000 multimillionaires who control three times more wealth than 50% of humanity bask in the sun. Nasdaq (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) is the largest electronic and automated stock exchange in the United States. Founded in 1971, it is known for listing the leading companies in the technology sector and for digitizing share trading without the need for a physical trading floor.