Locomotive

The financial industry thrives off the exaggerated emphasis the press gives to the market averages, because it conditions the public to believe that Wall Street is the locomotive. The public is the locomotive. Wall Street is the club car, being propelled under the power of others.

Wall Street would suffer instant death if the public exiled them from the economy. They are not self-supporting and they have few job skills ( if you don't count gambling and charging a markup on any transaction they can get their hands on ). On the other hand, if Wall Street abandoned the public, the public would rapidly dust themselves off and rebuild a genuine economy, because they would have lost nothing- they'd still have themselves, the land, the real estate and the tools.

Economies existed for centuries without speculative markets. If they were to disappear again, new less costly and less socially destructive sources of money and credit would evolve quickly ( the 'new' money would hopefully be a return to an older style of money that pre-dates debt backed fiat paper ), and people would wonder why we ever supported Wall St. for as long as we did..