Here’s a stylized history of US public stock markets. In the olden days, anyone could raise money for a project by selling stock to the public, and lots of people did, often by making false promises. This crested in the 1920s, as people rushed to buy stocks and borrow money to juice their speculative bets. Then there was a crash and a Great Depression. To restore confidence in markets, Congress passed some laws — particularly the Securities Act of 1933 and the Exchange Act of 1934 — to regulate ...