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Yes, I’m talking to you, even if you are not a trust fund baby—make that especially if you are not a trust fund baby.

I fear that with all the politicized talk of “Wall Street” and the images that shorthand conjures up in our minds of rapacious bankers and hedge fund managers, we’ve lost track of what the stock market is really all about. A bright young colleague of mine recently said she’d put a little money in the market, had seen it appreciate, but was now feeling a bit guilty about her “blood money” and wanted to cash out.

I fear her disdain is common among millennial progressives, who aren’t likely to break out in celebration if and when the Dow Jones Industrial Average breaks through the 20,000-point milestone it has approached in recent weeks. A Gallup survey last spring reported that only 52 percent of respondents had any money (or a spouse’s money) invested in the stock market, the lowest percentage in several decades.

That’s a shame. The stock market is not only a barometer of our nation’s business ingenuity, it’s also a testament to our shared commitment to a meritocratic form of participatory democracy.

I was reminded of this reading Shoe Dog, Phil Knight’s engaging and refreshingly candid memoir. The Nike founder recounts how financially stressful the company’s early days were, not only at the very beginning but well after it had become apparent that consumers craved Nike’s revolutionary running shoes, and the company was doubling its sales every year. The trouble was, the faster the scrappy Oregon-based competitor to the Adidas behemoth grew, the more nervous its bankers became, having to finance Knight’s vision “on the float,” paying the costs for each new product cycle before their revenue came in to cover the bills. The only answer, which Knight resisted until 1980, was to raise capital by going public; only then was Nike’s long-term success assured.

The stock market enabled the swoosh to eclipse Adidas as an iconic global brand, giving consumers more choice and, yes, making Knight and those who chose to back him billions of dollars in the ensuing decades. And now the stock market is the only reason scrappy Under Armour has itself been able to scale up to take on what it considers—as Knight once considered Adidas—the dominant but unimaginative incumbent in the industry based in Oregon. The market’s wonderfully subversive that way.

It’s become a political trope to talk about the distinction between “Wall Street” and “Main Street” but what a stock market allows is for the most worthy ideas from Main Street to grow and succeed. Think what you will of the bankers on Wall Street, but the market is really about whether we will all be able to benefit from the inspiration of a Phil Knight or a Steve Jobs, and those who will improve upon what they have done.

Knight’s initial hesitation to going public—the significance of the phrase itself is worth appreciating—arose from the same reason the rest of us should appreciate the stock market and seek to preserve its central role in our economy. He understood that once a company trades its shares on the market, it is accountable to the public. In exchange for being able to raise money from perfect strangers like you via your pension fund or 401(k), companies listed on the stock market are forced by landmark New Deal era legislation to embrace a radical degree of transparency, reporting quarterly results and any reverses they suffer along the way. Their managers, meanwhile, become directly subservient to outside shareholders. Knight had no choice but to embrace such transparency—his parents were not in a position to lend him millions of dollars to bankroll his company’s growth.

Which brings us (sorry) to Donald Trump. Our president-elect’s personal story, business practices, and worldview don’t reflect the ethos of the stock market. Indeed, the opaque and dynastically-run Trump Organization is the antithesis of a democratic, publicly-traded company.

It’s a fun mental exercise to imagine Trump having to navigate the challenges of running a publicly-traded company all those years, if he hadn’t been able to take the aristocratic route of being financed by his father, around the same time that Knight was having to access the public market. Imagine Trump having to report each quarter to pesky journalists, analysts, and institutional investors how the company was faring, and why. Imagine him having to file public disclosures about all his vindictive litigation, and having to address pointed questions about why the CEO of a modestly-sized company was flying around in a 757, and appointing relatives to run various divisions, not to mention tarnishing the company’s brand by disparaging Latinos, Muslims, women, and plenty of other Americans.

Who knows, maybe Trump’s company, thus cured of its cult of personality, would have become a more formidable enterprise, one more closely resembling its creator’s hyperbole. Trump himself would have been long deposed, or long-since reformed into a person better qualified to represent and work on behalf of competing stakeholders and interests in a strategic manner—better qualified, that is, to be President of the United States.

Of course the stock market is far from perfect. Capitalism entails risk, and for every windfall pension funds or individual investors reaped investing early in the likes of Microsoft and Nike, plenty of money has been lost backing bad ideas. You’re smiling now if you bought into Facebook when it started trading publicly and frowning if you invested in Twitter. But who’s to know where each will be in five years? And worse than the speculative uncertainty inherent in stock investing is the recurring sense, triggered by accounting and insider trading scandals, that the market may be rigged by people in the know.

Yet for all the scandals that have afflicted Wall Street, our system is far more efficient at funding worthy ideas to spark innovation and create jobs than any secretive and closed Trumpian world ever could be, where equity can only be raised from family, immediate associates, or a bank loan officer. Our system, with its relentless insistence on transparency and disclosure, is also far better at minimizing fraud. The rule of law and a certain level of social cohesion are key prerequisites for a system in which people are willing to fund ventures beyond their immediate circle; it’s no accident the first functional modern stock market was established in the cosmopolitan, relatively tolerant and egalitarian Dutch Republic, as opposed to a more static, dynastic society. And it should be a source of pride to Americans that our stock market remains the envy of the world. It’s easy for less open societies (see China) to open their own stock markets, but these don’t require the same level of transparency of listing companies, or protect the rights of minority shareholders to the degree ours does, which is why the best companies from those countries still yearn to be listed in our stock market.

The stock market shouldn’t be a partisan issue. It’s a shame that progressives don’t balance their justified outrage at some of Wall Street bankers’ excesses with an acknowledgment of the democratic essence of an accessible stock market that allows entrepreneurs and innovators to fund their companies and take on complacent incumbents. Without dynamic equity markets, our economy would be dominated entirely by private companies like the Trump Organization and business tycoons who inherited their dominant position. It’s a shame that President Obama hasn’t felt more comfortable explaining the market’s meritocratic ethos and applauding his own results in tripling the stock market’s value since its recession lows in the early days of his administration. It’s a shame that politicians from both parties spent this entire populist-tinged election cycle bad-mouthing the market, making millions of younger Americans like my colleague feel like they should stay away, or feel guilty if they don’t.

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Last month Argentine voters very narrowly opted for a political sea change, voting out the Peronist faction led by Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (she and her deceased husband governed the country for the last 12 years) and electing the conservative mayor of Buenos Aires, Mauricio Macri, to replace her.

The business-friendly president-elect ran in opposition to a government that has been highly divisive, defined by extensive social spending and statist economic policies that antagonized large business interests and foreign investors. Kirchner leaves office with a high approval rating of 50 percent, thanks to popular policies such as a per-child conditional cash-transfer policy for poor families and a focus on human rights, such as gay marriage. But the economy is stagnant, annual inflation is around 25 percent, and the fiscal deficit could amount to an alarming 6 percent of the country’s GDP this year.

President-elect Macri has promised to shock the highly regulated economy into market-based reality. One element of his approach will be the elimination of strict currency controls put in place to prevent capital flight. The cost could be a devaluation of up to 60 percent. Economists, like gym gurus, always seem to argue that a bright future can only be attained with short-term pain.

The government’s official exchange rate allows you to buy a dollar for about 9.6 pesos. But since 2011, access to dollars has been highly limited, in an attempt to keep people and companies from taking money out of the country.

Argentines unsatisfied with their permitted monthly quota of dollars—or unable to justify the provenance of their cash—are forced to turn to the black market, where a buck costs closer to 15 pesos, as established by supply and demand. Though it’s illegal, it’s hardly underground: The euphemistically named “dolár blue” rates are published on the front-page of leading newspapers, updated along with the official rate.

The spread is a window of opportunity for some Argentines who spend a lot of time and effort arbitraging between those two rates, relentlessly scheming over how to get cheaper dollars. Those can then be used to save, or lucratively resold on the black market at significant gain. The official exchange rate applies to many transactions, but Argentines desperate to hedge against inflation rail against limitations.

You do have to be on your toes to game the system. Credit card purchases in dollars are charged locally at the official exchange rate. One popular way to access dollars at the official rate is to charge travel to our plastic—hence the crowded flights to Miami. Travellers in line have been heard boasting that they take empty suitcases to the U.S. to fill with cheap consumer goods that can’t be obtained in Argentina or are prohibitively expensive because of import taxes. Chile has become another popular shopping destination for computers and Forever 21 clothes. Smuggling iPhones past Argentine customs is a rite of passage.

Those people flying to such exotic locales often bring with them a stack of debit cards belonging to friends and family members who are eager to withdraw dollars at overseas ATMs. Day trips to neighboring Uruguay with a pile of cards were a brief fashion until the government reduced the permitted withdrawal.

Argentina’s capital controls, or limits on how much foreign currency we can buy with our pesos, have been lax compared to those in some other countries. But using the dollar as a hedge against inflation and currency instability has become engrained in the Argentine middle-class DNA over several generations of crises.

Macri’s vow to remove the artificial official rate, and allow the market to prevail, is a move that most warily accept as necessary. The trouble is that the “cure” for terminating the disparity between the two competing dollar rates might trigger a short-term crisis of its own, as people absorb the shock of a sudden, massive devaluation of the peso, and of their living standards. The conundrum Macri will face is akin to what the U.S. Federal Reserve faces (on a smaller scale), knowing that it has to raise interest rates, but worrying about the impact of doing so, or of doing so too suddenly.

We’re all steeling ourselves for Argentina’s abandonment of heavy state intervention in the economy, in favor of free-market forces. We desperately hope we are not trading in one fantasy for another.

For now, businesses are stocking up on imports and stalling sales because they’re worried about losing money with payments that might come in after the devaluation. Producers are reportedly holding back stock—flour, pharmaceuticals, steel—instead of selling it; they’re betting that their products will be worth more later. Airlines won’t sell tickets more than three months in advance.

For average citizens, a peso that loses its value (over time or in one dramatic devaluation) only exacerbates the power of inflation to eat away at their savings. Money put away at the beginning of the year will buy significantly less by the end of the next, and so on. So instead it makes more sense to exchange pesos for goods that retain value better: real estate, cars, and even consumer electronics. Imagine a dollar burning a hole in your pocket because you don’t know if it will be worth 60 or 30 cents in a few months.

U.S. dollars, with the enduring value they represent, are the holy financial grail. From small wads stuffed under a mattress to a security box filled with piles of cash, dollars are the gold standard for Argentines. Dollars are perceived as the objective measure of value—to the point where property, perceived to have enduring value of its own, is priced in dollars. This national tic, proved right over the past few economic crises, in part explains why the currency controls have been a focal point for so much anger against the current government.

This year’s inflation rate will be between 15 to 26 percent. The fact that we don’t know the exact number, because the very data (both public and private) are politicized and contested, says a lot. Certain desirable models of cars have increased by over 45 percent and private schools have increased by an average of 37 percent this year. On the other hand, government intervention in the market keeps a basic food basket under the inflation rate and salaries tend to keep more or less apace.

Whether it’s failed government policy, as one side argues, or untamed speculative market forces, as the other side does, the never-ending weekly rise of vegetable prices that fall outside the price controls engenders a confused exhaustion. One week I skip buying tomatoes, because they’re just too pricey. The next, apples are so expensive that the tomatoes seem reasonable again.

With Macri and his market-friendly policies, Argentina will be the latest Latin American nation to take a step closer to the world-view of Washington and Wall Street. Along with the half of the country that voted to continue with “Kirchnerismo,” I am concerned that the touted adjustment will come at a high cost to our most economically vulnerable citizens. We are a country of extremes and I hope Macri’s change will not inaugurate a period of excessive austerity and recession.

As for me, I’m trying to delay my payment for this article. It’s not much, but the dollars I get for it might be worth significantly more in a few weeks.

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