Remove stock markets and the liquidity falls radically, and with it the supply of capital for companies to invest.

Just like now, you mean?

Stock markets are literally a late medieval throw-back - idiotic casinos for people with too much cash who don't understand how the physical world works and are only interested in mindless rat-headed comparisons of their personal rate of return while they chat with their fellow money morons at the country club.

Which sounds lime hyperbole, but if you look at the actual distribution profile of stock ownership in the West, you'll see it's not even an exaggeration.

Markets annihilate useful liquidity by skimming it off, hoarding it and wasting it, and also by raising the cost of entry for small innovators - because the last thing anyone with a good idea wants is to have to share board level control of it with some privileged frat jock who believes he's cooler and smarter than people who do real work.

The only sane way to use markets is to force investors to actually invest in real projects, to make investment more accessible, to create ratings agencies that aren't just political PR firms, and to aggressively redistribute profits into education, science R&D, and social investment.

And what's worse is that markets aren't just economic idiocy, they're also directly responsible for distoring politics in ways that are fatally corrosive to real participation and democracy.