Yeah, modern stock-market capitalism is, at its core, the layering of a 'second derivative' layer — growth in rate of growth of profit year-over-year — on top of the 'first derivative' — growth in profit year-over-year — that most non-financiers consider it to be. If you've read/seen "The Big Short" it helps immensely to consider how the layering of bets, tranches, and insurance is not the first time the financial industry has implemented widespread layering, it's just the first widely recognized time they've done so.

This is also why the market tolerates destructive private equity firms: their sole purpose is to create growth in the second derivate; that they 'pull up the ladder behind them', so to speak, by killing the business and terminating investment gains for investors in the first-derivative tier (market stockholders) and zeroth-derivative tier (capital investors), and that they kill great products in a market so that buyers are forced to buy shitty products, are recursively beneficial to more efficient cycles of vampirism.