Phantom wealth?

"Wall Street has no concern for the health people, community, or nature except as sources of short-term profit."  By David C. Korten

In his book, Agenda for a new Economy, the author, Korten, compares Wall Street as a cancer that has to be removed in order to heal our economy. I am mostly agree with those points that Korten makes; for example, he argues that the numbers that Wall Street people use create phantom wealth and deceive people by using their "language" such as capital and investment. Although I'm an accounting major student, when I first started studying accounting, I was a bit confused with concepts that were not quite "real" to me. Words like realized, unrealized, allocating, and depreciating are understandable with my head but not with my heart. Now I got used to it and can say I'm pretty good at it, yet I don't agree with those concepts. In that sense, I totally understand why Korten calls it phantom wealth because it is phantom. Those are artificially constructed revenues that are may or may not be realized. I don't believe a thing should be recorded as money only because it has a high "probability" to turn into money in future.

Nevertheless, there are some points that I don't quite relate to. Firstly, Korten frequently compares Wall Street capitalism and the Main Street markets, and he introduces a chart "Wall Street Capitalism verses Main Street Markets" (p. 51). It is easy to understand the point he tries to make, but it is too oversimplified to represent the reality. For example, Korten argues that "Wall Street makes money to make money for those who have money," which isn't really true. It is true that many wealthy people's money is managed by Wall Street people. However, it is also true that many main street people's money is also managed by Wall Street people, such as retirement planning. In addition, many main street people are engaged in investing activities. Plus, those big companies that Wall Street invests were once a small/ medium size companies in main street markets. I don't really agree with the idea that the main street market serves the community and Wall Street doesn't. Simplification is necessary to explain super complicated ideas and show the big picture. Yet, at the same time, it can provide a wrong perception and biased ideas to people without preliminary knowledge.

I'm almost half through the book, but the author hasn't really explained how we should re-design our economy. I'm really looking forward to what the author will suggest in order to eliminate poverty and achieve equality.