Are the banks and the stock markets relevant to sufficiency? My sense is that they are and that they tend foster insufficiency more than they foster sufficiency today. The banks’ and the stock markets’ primary motivation is to accumulate money and they tend to do this at our expense. First they tell us we can’t be safe, secure or have what we want until we have an abundance of money. Then they tell us we can’t have an abundance of money unless we give it to them. So we give it to them for a small pittance of interest or return, which they charge us for on one hand and lend it out to us for even more . If we are lucky we may profit somewhat from this investment but generally it tends to be the executives of the financial institutions and the traders who really profit our investments. We are left feeling dazed and insufficient, wondering why this is so. These institutions are the true accumulators and beneficiaries of our hard work.
If sufficiency was the goal of the economy, the goal of financial institutions would not be to accumulate money so much as to facilitate its use. It might be argued that the banks and the stock markets already do facilitate the use of money and this would be correct to some extent but the facilitation tends to be costly to the client and/or the primary goal tends to be to create more accumulation for the financial institutions. In a sufficiency economy, banks would narrow the spread between loans and interest accounts or eliminate interest altogether and simply charge fees for safekeeping and managing loans, which would reduce the incentive to hoard money and the risk of using money and therefore ease its use.
With regard to the stock market, in a sufficiency economy stock speculation, hedging and short selling, which adds no value to the market and is strictly accumulative, would be prohibited. Instead, the stock market would be structured to encourage long term investing, which would allow companies the opportunity to use the stock market to create stable and innovative ventures, instead of worrying about short-term quarterly profits and it would also allow investors to count on more stable long-term returns.