I disagree - if there were no capital markets, there would be nothing to build your house, or bed from. You would be forced to build your house and eat from wh

I disagree - if there were no capital markets, there would be nothing to build your house, or bed from. You would be forced to build your house and eat from what was lying around in your local area, even if you organise a tribal organisation to all help each other. You would live a short life and see many of your children die before their 5th birthday. Because that's how it used to be. The dramatic improvements in lives came about at the time of the industrial revolution, which in itself was partially an engineering outbreak, but also an outbreak of the abilities to raise and organise capital that had been perfected by financing risky and long sea voyages, which, in themselves brought about dramatic lifts in quality of life. No finance, no 'new world', no USA. I might add that 'capital markets' cover the entire span of financing, from angel investing to the big board in New York. The principles are just the same and the knowledge required is very similar. You may dislike the capital markets, but you cannot deny that the rise in standard of living, technology and wealth is not linked to the invention of both structured lending, pooled risk/reward and ability to trade both equity and debt to other people. If you meld my thoughts with PG's discussion at http://paulgraham.com/gap.html http://paulgraham.com/gap.html you can see the rise in wealth and living standards happening in parallell along with the developments of structured and tradeable debt, invention of partial ownership and tradeable securities (share markets) and of pooled risk taking (insurance). I also recommend Niall Fergusons' 'Ascent of Money' for a good backdrop into how/why this is. http://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/dp/1594201927 http://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/d... Again, you might dislike the role that markets have, but pretending they are some sort of bolt-on that could be disposed is very naive thinking.