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

[indeterminist.livejournal.com]

It's kind of like imagining people getting "cashed out" of their house. You could track down the person they bought it from and force them to buy it back, or even track all the way back along the owners since the original builder, but then you end up with the original builder having a house they don't want and suddenly having to come up with a big pile of money they probably already spent.

A stock exchange is just the middleman that hooks up person A that wants to sell X for $1 with person B who wants to buy X for $1. Each trade is one person selling something to one other person, so like with the house example if you want to undo a trade that means it comes out of somebody else's pocket.