I think you're on the right track there. Stock markets used to be a place for developers of Things (initially, railways) to acquire money for investments too large and/or too risky for a single bank, for companies to acquire money for growth, and for farmers / their customers to get reasonable pricing for their goods.
The problem is, once the gold standard fell and the rise of fiat money began, the financial markets became self-serving, with hordes of middlemen extracting the tiniest amounts of profits along the path, speculative trading driving up food prices, and people's care in old age no longer backed by the government in the form of a "societal contract" but by, essentially, betting on the economy ever growing and growing.
The gamble went on decent for a few decades, partially powered by ruthless exploitation of natural resources, but in the end the fundamental and long ignored issue of infinite growth being impossible (as anyone who ever played Paperclip should know) is now coming home to roost. The domestic resources of many countries are effectively exhausted (coal, gas and oil in Western Europe), leading to unhealthy dependencies on those countries that still do have these resources, and the consumer markets are either already saturated with cheap foreign-made goods or simply don't have enough money any more because rents are extracting too much money out of the people.
The problem is, once the gold standard fell and the rise of fiat money began, the financial markets became self-serving, with hordes of middlemen extracting the tiniest amounts of profits along the path, speculative trading driving up food prices, and people's care in old age no longer backed by the government in the form of a "societal contract" but by, essentially, betting on the economy ever growing and growing.
The gamble went on decent for a few decades, partially powered by ruthless exploitation of natural resources, but in the end the fundamental and long ignored issue of infinite growth being impossible (as anyone who ever played Paperclip should know) is now coming home to roost. The domestic resources of many countries are effectively exhausted (coal, gas and oil in Western Europe), leading to unhealthy dependencies on those countries that still do have these resources, and the consumer markets are either already saturated with cheap foreign-made goods or simply don't have enough money any more because rents are extracting too much money out of the people.