What is the purpose of wall street?

It's extremely complicated to explain in a brief manner. Wall Street firms mainly do three things:

1) Raise capital for businesses. (Allow businesses to grow)

2) Sales & Trading (Structure financial products, make markets for the products, trade stocks, options, etc.)

3) Manage assets and investment. (Mutual Funds, Private Wealth Management, etc.)

They are important for two reasons:

1) They allow businesses to grow.

2) They provide liquidity to the market. This means that if you want to sell some asset such as a stock, you are able to without the price falling. In turn, this encourages investment because the underlying assets that you are purchasing are liquid.

The collapse of a single large Wall Street firm would not harm the economy too much. The fear in 2008 was that the collapse of one would cause a chain reaction that would blow up the entire industry.

Without these firms, the economy wouldn't be able to function. Once again, this isn't meant to be a full explanation.

suppose you got a small company that's doing well. You'd love to expand nationwide but you don't have the cash. So you sell a chunk of your company to an investment company who sells it to the public via a stock offering. Your company gets the cash it needs to expand. Although you own a smaller percent of your company than you did before...now the company is much bigger so overall you are better off. That's sort of the way it's supposed to work.

Wall Street has many purposes one is to raise capital for investments and for business.

To set the fair market value of commodities.

To have a centralized location for sellers and buyers to come together for a transaction.

Wall Street is the epitome of capitalism, and capitalism creates wealth for most Americans

To steal our money in their eyes it's legal.