b'afford to risk, while the farmers are at 100% risk every day. Why arent we talking about sharing risk with the farmers, instead of minimizing risk to the investors? 9If theres such a thing as a group AHA!, one was had by the 70 folks who were in the room with Young when she uttered those words. Then theres this AHA! about investing from Marjorie Kelly: Stockholders fund major public corporationstrue or false?False, or, actually, a tiny bit truebut for the most part, massively false. In fact, most investment dollars dont go to corporations but to other speculators. Equity investments reach a public corporation only when a new common stock is soldwhich for major corporations is a rare event. Among the Dow Jones industrials, only a handful have sold new common stock in thirty years. Many have sold none in fifty years.The stock market works like a used car market, as former accounting professor Ralph Estes observes in Tyranny of the Bottom Line. When you buy a 1997 Ford Escort, the money goes not to Ford but to the previous owner of the car. Ford gets the buyers money only when it sells a new car. Similarly, companies get stockholders money only when they sell new common stock. According to figures from the Federal Reserve, in recent years about one in one hundred dollars trading on public markets has been reaching corporations. In other words, ninety-nine out of one hundred invested dollars are speculative. 10The money that buys stock rarely goes to the company but always ends up in the global casino. On the way to these AHA!s about food, money and economic growth, we are blocked not so much by ignorance as by cognitive dissonance. 9 Young is founder of the nonprofit FarmStart.10 The Divine Right of Capital, Marjorie Kelly (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, 2001), p. 114'