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The curtain drew back when the established Wall Street players, powers, and entities undeniably colluded in plain view to shut down trade during the Gamestop debacle, revealing just how unhealthy, manipulated, and unfair the NYSE really is for the small-time investor. Our situation clearly is very far from ideal, but that only makes the ideal more important to define and restore in my estimation.
As far as I can tell, healthy stock exchanges have three purposes: 1. Facilitate mutually beneficial exchange between entrepreneurs with creativity and investors with capital. 2. Determine the value of competing businesses and assets through active, decentralized trading and aggregate speculation, effectively churning the standings and keeping score. 3. Induce transparency by opening corporations' dealings to the public, inseparably tying corporations' actions and plans to their valuation. When the market is healthy nobody is in command, the market is distributed, the game is competitive, fair regulators arbitrate minimally, traders' churning keeps score, failure-capable corporations are responsive to public pressure, and new competition with fresh ideas can enter the market competitively.
Brilliantly, it's an ecosystem powered by greed and insured by selfishness, the basest and most reliable of human emotions - the animal root. Yet the ecosystem is delicate, reliant on all those elements being in place and functioning. Save the traders' churning like a system clock, everything else in the US market is broken or corrupted in one way or another.
Corrupt government meddling picks winners, the market centralized, there is collusion, the regulators are captive and incestuous, corporations which control public opinion are too big to fail, and new competition is consumed by the established corporate giants or crushed underfoot. Now to get back around to your question, stock is special because it's the only part of the market still functioning properly and it isn't exactly money, but value equivalent to a percentage of the company. Stock shares abstractly tokenize the ownership of a company and their nature is volatility in varying degrees. Aggregate speculation driven by share trading is the most efficient and accurate model we've developed to evaluate "all the things" and it serves the same function as a heartbeat or a system clock cycle. Taxing that trade in the market's current fucked-sideways status would be disastrous.
Think: making a 46yo cheeseburger enthusiast run wind-sprints in pads on a Texas summer day or overclocking a minitower with a GT 430 that hasn't been cleaned once in the 10 years it's spent on a chain-smoking Brooklyn Taxi Cab accountants' office floor - levels of disaster. |