Читать книгу Crisis and Inequality - Mattias Vermeiren - Страница 15

Stocks and bonds are financial assets that can be bought and sold on financial markets. Firms issue stocks and bonds to attract funding, which can be used to finance their operations or expand their production. Stocks and bonds have different implications both for the firm and for the owner of these assets. The purchaser of a company’s stocks becomes a partial owner of the firm – a shareholder – who receives a part of the company’s profits every year in the form of a dividend. The purchaser of a company’s bonds is only a lender to that company: bonds are a certificate of indebtedness that specifies the obligations of the borrower to the owner of the bond; it identifies the time at which the loan will be repaid (called the maturity) and the rate of interest that will be paid periodically until the loan matures. As such, investing in a company’s bonds is less ‘risky’ than investing in its stocks, as bond investors can be sure to get all their money back if the company does not go bankrupt. The returns for a stock investor, by contrast, depend on the profitability of the firm and its performance on the stock market. See chapter 5 for a more elaborate discussion.

Most individuals do not own stocks or bonds on their own account. In most cases, individuals invest their money in stocks and bonds (or other types of financial assets) through institutional investors like private pension funds and mutual funds. These institutional investors pool money from both small savers and wealthy individuals to purchase a variety of financial assets in order to diversify risk. Although many middle-income households have invested some of their savings in financial assets through these institutional investors, the ownership of financial wealth remains highly unevenly distributed in every society. In the United States, for instance, the top 10 per cent of US households owns more than 80 per cent of all the stocks that have been issued by publicly listed US corporations.