There's some debate on this but it's widely agreed that giving housing loans to people who otherwise wouldn't have qualified for those loans (most of whom were the usual suspect minorities) caused the 2008 housing bubble. Observing the recent "Gamestonk" debacle, something occurred to me. Our rulers seem intent to undemocratically push through basic income, while preventing many people from working, even though the poor are already getting welfare. Maybe they want to believe they're saving the environment or something. But a basic income society is going to be dependent upon a really stable and sophisticated economic system to avoid turning into hyper-inflation. This presumably means stonks. And what do people who didn't earn money often do with it? Not all of them of course but enough of them that it can cause a problem will take that money and they speculate, they gamble, they flip houses. The ones doing drugs are arguably less of a problem than they are. Even though most of them will lose that money, they know more is coming in later on and it's fun for them to try, so why not? With this in mind, "Gamestonk" is probably the first of many such events and not a one-off. The housing bubble happened because the loans were there for housing - UBI would open this kind of behavior to literally everything that can be bought with money. One thing they might try to do then is limit the UBI to specific things. Just as SNAP is limited to certain purchases, our UBI might be divided up into food, transportation, recreation. But this would only lead to widespread black markets (what we currently call welfare fraud) except that everyone would have a reason to be doing it. And the greater the share of our income that becomes micromanaged UBI, the greater the black markets, reliance upon emerging cryptocurrencies etc. Our rulers in Davos have been described as "billionaires talking to millionaires about what ordinary people need". It's my impression that these billionaires are often workaholics who do not understand how dangerous free time and free money can be to certain kinds of people because none of them are those kinds of people. There is nothing that stops smart people from creating bubbles and acting according to mistaken impressions. It's arguably the entire history of mankind since powerless people are by definition never the ones who were making the wrong choices.
Those are interesting thoughts that had not come to my mind previously. I think your premise is spot on. Since free money was easily gained, it is just as easily used to speculate and gamble, and that will change the value of all manor of things, including stonks.
