Is trading on America’s stockmarket fair?

equity means fairness. To an investor or a stockbroker, though, it is an ownership stake. The word means both things thanks to the English Court of Chancery, which operated from around the 15th to the 19th centuries and handed out rulings based on “equity”, or fairness, rather than common law. Under common law a borrower who missed a mortgage payment would forfeit their land, but in Chancery they could reclaim it by repaying the debt. Over time, “equity” came to mean the ownership stake in property itself. Today’s legal and regulatory systems are tasked with ensuring that finance is fair. And Gary Gensler, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, America’s markets watchdog, is not happy. In a speech on June 8th he worried that “market segmentation and concentration” mean there is no longer a “level playing-field” in the stockmarket. It is “not clear”, he said, that the “market system is as fair and competitive as possible for investors”.