Sanity badly needed to rebalance the economy globally and in the UK | Letters

Isn't it about time something serious was done about the global lottery that the various stock markets have become, where share trading is just an upmarket form of gambling (Panic selling grips markets as fears for global economy grow, 21 January)? Of course, under capitalism, the basics of what the stock market does (or used to do) are part of the system but now, with trading done every second of every day, the deals have almost nothing to do with the real world. And I haven't mentioned micro-trading, which happens between computers and faster than any human can witness.

How about, for a start, making all deals last for, say, 24 hours? You buy shares and must keep them for a day. Then we could get on to some serious reform, say holding shares for a week at a time, then quarterly? I won't go quite as far as Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels, who suggested we should all have to carry all our possessions with us all of the time, but we surely need some sanity and not this perpetual doom and boom stuff we have had this last half century or more.