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I'm not really sure how the stockmarket screws over your bog standard worker.
Who buys stocks? Pensions, speculators, etc... people hoping for an increase in value.
Except... they don't buy stocks, instead they pour money into funds and the funds buy stock.
The problem is that funds charge fees that extract a standing amount on either per-trade value or total stock held.
What you get is essentially something that looks like this (extremely simplified view):
- Value in a company no longer goes to workers, but goes to shareholders
- Shareholders are funds
- Funds extract fees
- Downstream shareholders (pensions, speculators) extract what they can
And you see that the system is entirely designed to send a stream of money upwards, deposit the largest amount in the hands of a very few fund managers, and then distribute the rest downstream.
A very small fraction of money is deposited within the company during an IPO or stock issuance event... the vast majority of the real world value washes around on the ever changing tidal flows of the stock market constantly depositing cash as a silt on the fund managers and large shareholders.
Because of all of this, the worker is never enriched, whilst those who are able to influence or predict the tidal patterns are repeatedly enriched.
- Value in a company no longer goes to workers, but goes to shareholders
Velocio-
Well said :)
Le Manfriend had a thought that stock holding, instead of private / worker owned, companies also tend to maximise profit over workers. For example the company is fine, it really doesn't need to do this to preserve it's future, but work is moved to lower wages countries anyway.
Would be an interesting hypothesis to test.
JWestland
I assume he's in favour of appropriate levels of regulation. Note that a huge amount of regulation existed prior to the financial crisis.
I'm not really sure how the stockmarket screws over your bog standard worker. It's an incredibly effective way of providing investment to enable companies to grow.
Given the size of the financial services industry in the UK I also find the idea of wanting to tax and limit its competitiveness globally hard to understand.