Democratizing Investment*

Abstract

Americans have trillions of dollars invested in public and private companies, yet stock ownership is highly unequal: the wealthiest 1 percent of households possess 40 percent of all wealth, and there is a large and persistent racial wealth gap. What if innovations in distributed technologies allowed for democratic facilitation of new opportunities for wealth and a rebalancing of power within the capital markets? This article proposes using innovative financial technologies to create a “Public Investment Platform”—a public option for participation in capital markets—and a “Public Investment Account” to universalize access to investment opportunities. Capital markets are currently governed by public policies that submerge the role of the public in structuring them and enable an inequitable accumulation of wealth. To democratize finance, new policies are required to democratize participation in investment.