Scott Galloway doesn\u2019t want the markets to go up. He said so out loud, live at South by Southwest, and the audience\u2014skewing young\u2014didn\u2019t boo him. They cheered.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt some point,\u201d Galloway told the crowd during a taping of\u00a0the Prof G Markets<\/a>\u00a0podcast on Monday, \u201cWe have to stop propping up the markets with young people\u2019s credit cards.\u201d<\/p>\n It was a throwaway line dropped near the end of a longer riff about war, oil prices, and the mechanics of economic decay. But it landed like a thesis statement\u2014and it inadvertently explained the entire psychology behind Gen Z\u2019s flight into prediction markets, meme stocks, crypto, and speculative gambling.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s Galloway\u2019s argument, stripped to its core: for the last 40 years, every time a genuine economic shock threatened to destroy capital\u2014the dot-com crash, the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID collapse\u2014the U.S. government intervened. Not to protect workers. To protect assets. To protect owners. The debt and stimulus that financed those rescues lands on younger generations.<\/p>\n \u201cRather than let assets collapse and take money from the owners and give advantage back to the earners,\u201d Galloway said, speaking directly to Gen Z<\/a>, \u201cwe\u2019re going to pull out your credit card and ensure, in the form of debt and stimulus, that I stay rich.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe reason I\u2019m economically secure,\u201d he explained, goes back to the 2008 collapse. Yes, the government bailed out the banks, but they let the markets collapse, and as a result Galloway said he got to buy stock in Apple<\/a>, Amazon<\/a>, and Netflix<\/a> for between $8 to $12 per share each. Looking at today\u2019s market, he asked, \u201cWhere do you find value right now?\u201d Gen Z already knows the answer\u2014and it\u2019s not in equities.<\/p>\n The Dow<\/a> and S&P as proxies for wealth<\/p>\n The Dow and the S&P, Galloway argued, are not indicators of economic health. They are \u201ceffectively a proxy for how the rich are doing. And spoiler alert\u2014they\u2019re doing really well.\u201d A market correction, Galloway said, would be a feature, not a bug\u2014a recalibration in which housing prices would fall<\/a>, stocks would become affordable, and capital flows would go back from owners to earners.<\/p>\n New data released this month by Northwestern Mutual<\/a> found that nearly a third of Gen Z investors have been exposed to prediction markets, and the cohort leads all generations in meme coin activity and usage of speculative platforms like Polymarket. The study attributed the trend<\/a> to a belief that previous rules of growth and finance broke down creating a generation of investors who suspected market manipulation and tried to seek better returns in new markets. Bloomberg, surveying the same data, called it \u201cfinancial nihilism.\u201d<\/p>\n But nihilism implies irrationality. What Galloway described at SXSW is the rational engine underneath the behavior. If the traditional system is structurally designed to enrich those who already own assets \u2014 and if every crash is backstopped before young buyers can get in at the bottom \u2014 then the conventional playbook isn\u2019t just unappealing. It\u2019s a trap. Prediction markets, meme coins, and speculative bets aren\u2019t signs of recklessness. They are the logical response of a generation that has concluded the casino is rigged and decided to find a different one.<\/p>\n Intergenerational wealth transfer<\/p>\n