HACKER Q&A
📣 runawaybottle

Is the stock market one of the stupidest things we created as a society?


Serious question. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around it but can’t seem to make sense of it.

  👤 onion2k Accepted Answer ✓
The stock market performs two useful functions - a mechanism to raise capital (IPOs) and a mechanism to distribute profit (dividends).

We could live without it, and in an unequal society it's a bit broken because it tends to concentrate wealth when there's people who have massive amounts of market-making power, but removing it would probably be worse. In the 60s and 70s when ordinary people owned a more significant proportion of shares it worked quite well.