I think that there are very few occasions where an IPO is necessary, in those cases however, there could indeed by an investor who needs to sell his shares or, if he can't do this in an easy way such as using an exchange, would maybe not ever touch an IPO. I think there are enough long-term investors out there who would take a stake in the company at IPO time without having an easy way out, such as insurance companies.

Your point about the difference between markets in general and stock exchanges is a good one. thanks. My main gripe is with stock exchanges because they made all the shenanigans of the past 20 years possible. By commoditising the selling and buying of company fractions so easy a whole entire industry has developed which parasticially feeds on these transcations and in many ways turns the whole market into a big Ponzi scheme.

That is the question. The point of stock markets is to allow ownership of a publicly traded corporation to be bought and sold, since the point of shares is that they represent votes at the Annual General Meeting. Its only in the neo-classically inspired economic models that the primary role of stock markets is to raise capital, and since these models are already falsified at their core, what's the harm of one more fallacy added on top?

Forcing all corporations to be privately held corporations would be a big move with a lot of unintended consequences. And the more wrenching the move, first, the greater the likelihood that efforts invested into mobilizing to achieve it will be for naught, and second, the greater the risk that the unintended consequences will include massively malignant ones.

Saying it explicitly, the proposal is either to force owners of corporations to remain owners of the corporation until they die or the corporation goes bankrupt is not, or else to make some cosmetic change to how stocks are traded with no real major impacts.

If the former, why not just propose abolishing open-ended charters and require charters to be renewed every fourteen years? That would allow corporations to be brought to heel by binding them with new charter terms, and that would not be anywhere near as massive an institutional change as abolishing publicly traded corporations.

And if the latter, why bother?

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.