What Does Wall Street Do?

[ZenGum]

Financial markets * can * serve a socially useful purpose - as a way to raise capital to fund genuine economic development: building a new factory or port facility or something.

A lot of what goes on there is just clever ways of acquiring possession of existing resources.

Quite a lot is somewhere in between.

The first kind of activity is the great redeeming feature of capitalism, that it is the best means of creating wealth.
The worst kind is mere legalised theft, the Big Lie, the kind of transfer of wealth to a tiny few which leads to social demoralisation, and ultimately revolution and/or collapse.

It is a judgement call as to how much and what kind of regulation we can apply to restrict the bad activity without choking off the good.