Richard D. Wolff

Is a stock market necessary? With its propensity to become merely another form of organized crime that, like organized crime of the past, ran numbers or facilitated gambling, its current state, coupled with the "too big to fail", "The taxpayers will bail us out or accept economic collapse." state, is a complete danger to society. Could the stock market be dismantled without massive damage to living standards? In an ideal world or in a vacuum, could it be either dismantled entirely or reduced to merely an IPO only system where people invested in companies and only received compensation from dividends and trading was forbidden? Is there even a better option? With a media that we have now that creates short-term memory, people seem to forget that we end up bailing out billionaires about every decade. We did in the eighties, in 1998, and then again in 08. It seems those running these schemes know they can get away with it if they don't do it more than once a decade.