My cure for the economy

My cure for the economy is to stop gambling on things that are too important to be played with.
Manufacturing / business
Housing

What do I mean.
A person buys shares in a company in the stock market .
The capital of that company is the money lent to it by all its shareholders.
That money is essential to the company to function - to buy raw materials and machinery and to pay its staff and costs and modernize when necessary.
In return the  shareholder is paid dividends.
If the company does well the shareholder may be rewarded in two ways - by an  increase in dividends and an increase in share price.
When I buy shares I am gambling - taking a punt
If I get it wrong - I can lose  - big time
But
if I get right - I can win - and make money.

It is a similar thing with housing
Until the recent credit crunch it was a dead cert that if you bought a property - you would very quickly be able to sell it for healthy profit. It wasn't  much of a gamble.
Has that changed - perhaps - many people are predicting that the new housing upward spiral will end in disaster.
But most of us ordinary people buy property because we need somewhere to live.
But many others buy as an investment - an alternative to the stock market - as a gamble.

People with spare cash invest in many things.
Bank saving accounts are now useless due to terrible  interest rates.
What else is there apart from property or the stock market?
Well- works of art, antiques, old cars etc
Any investment is a gamble.

My point is that gambling on manufacturing and housing is too dangerous to our nation to be allowed.
In Germany home ownership is much lower than the UK. The Germans are not encouraged to gamble with their homes. If you buy a property in Germany and sell it within a certain number of years you are very heavily taxed on any profit.
In this country there used to be a system through taxation that encouraged shareholders to hold their shares in a company for a long time so that it was a true investment in that company and not a quick punt.

I would like to see the UK Government bring in both these measures
And as for -
Investment banking and all the horrific new weird products they keep dreaming up of gambling with our precious savings,
I would get rid of them all.

Ordinary banks at present can  legally have a bank balance of 20 times the amount of money they actually have.
This is crazy - no wonder there are problems. I gather that the powers-that-be are aware of this but dare not do anything  for fear of another disaster .
I would like to see a long term aim, to work towards a situation, were no-one lends out more than they have.
Perhaps this will happen with  new internet peer to peer lending and then banks will become a thing of the past.