It's because they imply hubris, arrogance, control.
Let's just realize that we all have a lot less control over our environment than we think we do, and some things are just forces beyond anyone's control.
I think it's more likely that every person at every link in the chain is following some incentive: financial experts within banks are saying whatever they think will get governments to stop putting up interest rates (we're in a banking crisis), journalists are repeating interesting and dramatic news from their sources (that we're in a banking crisis), their editors are careful not to block an important message (that we're in a banking crisis), and so on.
The net effect is possibly going to be moving wealth to the top, but if you take a conspiratorial view, the solution seems like it's "find the shadowy council working behind the scenes and force them to stop". If it's just distributed rational decision-making you have to take a systems-level view of what the incentives are and work to change the overall behaviour of everyone, which is a much more complicated problem.
No conspiracy theories required.
It's a distraction to point fingers at left or right.
Close willing coordination between a whole bank or a whole newspaper is less believable. Small-scale coordination is possible, yeah: PR firms pitching articles, revolving-door hiring, conflicts of interest, bias upstream in academia, or even an editor meeting a banker for golf and squashing a story; these things are all believable. These are not the same as a statement like "the news media is helping shift wealth to the top", or at least they have many caveats.
I hate the implications of dated mental models.
Like entities with like goals are going to take like actions. There doesn't have to be back room top-secret coordination.
FFF starlings do it. Starlings!!!
but the idea that rich people are acting in a manner to maintain/increase their wealth aint exactly a conspiracy theory.
This is the correct statement and it's not a conspiracy theory, it's a banality.
The question becomes identifying zero sum games and finding optimal solutions for the public at large.
What's the pattern?
That's the pattern.
Read something like Anarchy - the East India Company. Sheer luck got them to where they ended up, despite them being a) a literal "conspiracy" (a corporation) and b) bumbling fools on repeated occasions.
What happened after 2007/ 2008?
What happened during / after Covid?
There is zero reason to imply any of those things. The data speaks for itself.
The data points to wealth redistribution but the causes are larger than some dark cabals. Globalization is the biggest one and globalization is such a huge topic not even 1000 CEO out together could begin to understand it.
>Let's just realize that we all have a lot less control over our environment than we think we do
Do the privately run secretive organization that sets the time value of money and the people that influence it not have "control"?
To be clear, I'm talking about the central bank.
Fed is 98% talk and 2% action.
I disagree. Any organization that can unilaterally set interest rates and add infinite assets to its balance sheet (two actions capable of moving the largest markets significantly) has tremendous amounts of control over the economy.
The vast majority of people are just unaware how much of an impact monetary policy has on their behavior.
The business cycle is a well-documented fact of the economy, caused by basic microeconomics. The busts have as good a reason to be there as do the booms.
Plus the business cycle has booms which are on average much longer than the busts, an angle which conspiracy theorists frequently choose to ignore.
The business cycle is not a conspiracy theory, thinking the business cycle is somehow "made" or "artificial" or "controlled" is a conspiracy theory.