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.

[xoxoxoBruce]

A friend was telling me yesterday, he has two nieces, sisters. One is a surgeon who was "drafted" by Harvard Medical, and the other was a securities broker for for Goldman or Lehman. The difference is monetary reward caused considerable family friction.

[Lamplighter]

Zen, I think you're spot-on...

Certainly there are benefits from corporations as legal entities
to raise money via stock and bonds to do work.
And some do go into various forms of bankruptcy.

But viable corporations don't die !
They only replace their elder minions, who do die and
their estates do get re-distributed back into society.
So corporations grow year after year acquiring capital assets.

Follow this to it's ad nauseum end and corporations will eventually
essentially own all such assets: business, financial, real estate., etc.,
unless there is some form of governmental balancing their capital growth.
Currently I don't see any such a balancing mechanism.