Day: August 27, 2025

The stock market is a place where shares (or parts) of publicly owned companies are traded for cash. The idea behind it is that if a company grows sales and profits, the value of its shares will increase, allowing investors to sell their shares later at a higher price. There are many different factors that influence stock prices.

For instance, the demand for a particular company’s shares changes over time depending on how well it’s performing, the general state of the economy and other factors that don’t necessarily affect a specific company. The same goes for the supply of a particular company’s shares; if more people want to buy, the share price will rise.

If you’re interested in investing, you can open a brokerage account through a licensed broker, on your own or with the help of an investment advisor. You can then use your account to place buy orders for individual stocks or for groups of stocks, called funds. These include mutual funds and exchange traded funds (ETFs).

The securities industry is regulated by federal and state laws. In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission oversees the national markets while the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, is more focused on protecting retail investors. This regulation helps maintain investor confidence in the marketplace. Publicly traded companies are also required to follow stringent reporting rules, which gives us a better view into how they operate and how well their businesses are doing.

Since the US stepped onto the world stage as the “world’s policeman” it has employed a wide range of regime change policies. Regime change policies include covert and overt efforts to support a political movement, back military coups, or outright intervene in the domestic politics of another country with the goal of replacing that government with a new one.

The rationale for regime change is that a non-democratic government, with its corrupt and incompetent leadership, does not serve the people’s interests. The regime’s leaders may commit atrocities and oppress their citizens, leading them to believe that if they were replaced with a democratically-elected government that had the interests of its people in mind the country would be a better place to live. This argument is flawed on many levels.

American officials have a vested interest in supporting democracy around the world, but using armed force to promote regime change is not the way to do it. The historical record shows that armed regime-change missions rarely succeed as intended and often produce unintended consequences, including humanitarian crises and weakened internal security in the targeted state.

In addition, a regime change operation will have severe costs for American foreign policy in the long term. When foreign polities begin to associate the United States with its own history of imperial ambition, they become much less willing to work with it, making it more difficult for the US to advance its own interests.