[2strokebloke]

Actually I'm not through with the stock market, because the stock market is the main reason for many problems with the economy. The stock market is entirely concerned about short term profit. Investors are good to get something moving, but they will ruin everything in the long run.
One reason is control, a company cannot be run in one direction, if all the major investors have different ideas about which direction the company should be going. Henry Ford, with his giant ego couldn't stand this, so by the end of the 1920s he had bought back nearly all of the stock he had sold in his company during it's first few years of operation - even paying more for it than it was worth in some instances. He made the right choice. Ransom E. Olds left his company, Oldsmobile - because the directors and investors wanted him to design cars that he didn't want to sell.
further, the stock market is responsible for poor craftsmanship, the loss of American jobs, and the decline of American industry.
For example - Dodge, they moved their engine production facilities to Mexico for cheaper labor. O.K. so American jobs lost - that's one strike against them
Strike two? They don't pass the savings of their reduced production costs on to American consumers.
Why would they do this? Simple, they're not concerned with an end product, or with satisfying customers - they're only interested in making their profit growth look higher so they can make the stock investors happy. That's disgusting.
Further as has been common with American companies - if the profits fall - just lay off a few hundred or thousand people - bam, you just made your numbers look good again (at least for a while) and your stock holders are pleased. It's a great way to run a company short term, but it's also a great way to go out of business in the long term.
This is exactly what is wrong with the domestic car manufacturers, this is why import sales have increased so dramatically since the 1970s. The American companies were telling the American people what they wanted - rather than listening to them and giving them what they actually wanted. When they scrambled to beat the foreign threat in the 70s - they lost because they weren't prepared, they rushed in to build compacts to get in on the market and make a quick profit (again, happy stockholders) but they hadn't done their research well enough, and it didn't take long for the American consumer to become disenchanted with cars like the Vega and Pinto. The worst part is the long term effect - there are people who will never buy another Ford or Chevy because they owned one of these cars. Lesson learned the hard way - in a capitalist free market economy, it's the consumer who get's their say, not the bean counters and stock holders.
Further more, it's impossible to have any truly original ideas or inventions - because we don't have individuals anymore - engineers have no freedom of design, there are no more men like Olds, or Issigonis, or Andre Citroen in the automotive industry. The director of the company doesn't say "make a car that meets these parameters" and then lets the engineers do whatever they want to achieve those goals. Everything has to go through a comitee and turn into the same boring blob that every other company has.
Why? As you've already admitted, investors don't like to take chances (as well as stupid safety and emissions crap, etc. etc. etc.) if the head of the company held a conference and said "nobody has ever built anything like this before" only a few adventurous investors would decide to stay on.
Now that I really think about it - everything these days is designed to keep anybody from being creative.
Anyway, I have to disagree with your idea that a "conservative" economy is one where nothing ever happens - in keeping with the conservative idea that anybody can do anything if they try hard enough, it's the little guys, the backyard tinkerers, and the independent entrepeneurs who are our hope for the future - because they'll be the ones putting the slow moving, giant bureaucracies out of business.