Data & Research

Securities and Exchange Cartel

At the Securities and Exchange Cartel, our Data and Research Division exists to answer the hard questions nobody brave enough to own a yacht was willing to ask. After years of expensive studies, elite consultants, luxury retreats, and several aggressively catered lunches, our findings are clear: being poor is bad, and having money is significantly better than not having money.

To prove this, we did what all serious institutions do when they already know the answer. We commissioned a report, added charts, inserted a few stock photos of diverse people pointing at laptops, and paid a consulting firm $8.7 million to say it in a font that looked responsible.

Our friends at Pew Pew Research recently confirmed what markets have been whispering for years. Being poor is commonly, frequently, and in many documented cases, absolutely no fun.

When people are poor, they often want things. Then, through no fault of the private equity community, they frequently do not have the money to buy those things.

Here at the SEC, we are firmly against that, at least in theory. We believe every American should have the opportunity to want better things from a respectful distance while rich people continue owning them.

Last year, we spent millions of dollars on focus groups to study this issue in depth. We gathered a diverse sample of people in a conference room, gave them room-temperature sandwiches, and asked one groundbreaking question: “Would you rather be rich or poor?”

The results stunned even our most overpaid analysts. A remarkable 100% of respondents said they would rather be rich, making it one of the strongest findings in the history of asking people questions from which there is no dignified escape.

The research company told us this was the highest response rate they had ever recorded. It was also the highest invoice they had ever sent, which made the whole project feel very official.

Over the last three years, we have spent more than $30 million sending out questionnaires, posting online surveys, organizing panel discussions, and hiring poor people with limited options to walk door-to-door asking strangers whether they would prefer wealth or financial despair. These brave survey workers were paid $8 an hour, no benefits, and the priceless opportunity to participate in democracy-adjacent data collection.

The ones who survived asked the public our signature research question: “Would you rather be rich or poor?” Once again, an astounding 100% of the people who did not threaten the survey taker answered, “I’d rather be rich.”

That result is even higher than the famous sugarless gum survey, where four out of five dentists agreed on something and the fifth dentist apparently had a problem with consensus. Our study achieved perfect agreement, which in the data world means the truth has finally stopped pretending to be complicated.

With data like this, one can only conclude that it is better to be rich. The numbers are clear, the charts are colorful, and the consultants have already cashed the checks.

That is why we make it our job, every single day, to keep rich people rich. Not because it is easy, not because it is popular, and not because the poor people in the surveys specifically asked us to do that, but because someone has to protect the people who already won.