What would happen if...

[tabbiewolf]

Fun with random things that occur to me out of the blue and with no sense of justice implied (I mean that seriously, I am NOT being sarcastic believe it or not):

What would happen if the stock market ended? NOT in a terrorist act, or the power all went out and everything had to stop like Hurricane Sandy the other year, but...it just ended? Everything cashed out, everyone got the money they'd already invested/earned/etc., but there was no more stock exchange?

I suppose I'm talking about the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ specifically, but obviously stocks are something that happen worldwide. For the sake of my argument, let's keep it in the United States.

I really don't know enough about economics to even predict something like that, but it would be interesting to see how a capitalist society like we very much are would react to something like that happening.

Comments

[dalesql.livejournal.com]

There would be massive confusion, and pretty quickly some other mechanism would arise to satisfy the actual basic function of the stock exchange. That real function is a more or less central place for people to buy and sell ownership in companies. The problem is that this basic function has had this huge additional edifice of 'finance' built on top of it. then greedy people sneak into the system and run it with no regard for anything but personal gain. See Messrs Ponzi and his imitators. Also, these other finance people would go to their pet congresscritters to recreate their comfortable niche in the economic ecosystem

I absolutely agree that the whole financial industry needs to be taken out and put to work doing something productive, like cleaning out pigpens with their hands. The news media is very complicit in propping up the edifice of finance. The finance industry in all its facets generates vast amounts of statistics that people like Bloomberg have specialized in collecting, analyzing and selling the results. These results are actually useful to a relatively small number of people who work in the industry. But they are reported widely to the general public as important daily news as if they actually were measurements of the US economy. So this adds unjustified gravitas to the whole wall street money juggernaut.

Some wall street trader does not create wealth via his or her work. The farmer growing a crop creates wealth. A worker welding a bridge together creates wealth, an artist or designer creating something that never existed before creates wealth. A scientist discovering a new useful thing creates wealth. All that wall street does is allow ownership of things to be traded around, and for the inventor to sell a portion of his new idea to get the capitol funds needed to build the factory to turn his idea into wealth.