What is Wall Street for ?

Felix Salmon looks at the falling number of publicly listed companies on US major domestic exchanges and sees a dangerous trend eventually leading to make stock markets irrelevant for the economy.

Put another way, as the number of initial public offerings steadily declines, the stock market is becoming little more than a place for speculators and algorithms to compete over who can trade his way to the most money.

This echoes an old debate about whether bank-based or market-based systems allocate capital more efficiently and one that should be revisited in the light of these past decades' financial innovation and its consequences.