When the Market Closes Its Doors: The New Frontiers of Financial Inequality

By Anthony Hamelle, Senior Advisor, Côme New York.

There are almost half as many listed companies today as there were thirty years ago. Behind that simple fact lies a deep transformation of capitalism, one that has quietly redefined who gets access to growth, and who must settle for volatility.

The Great Retreat from the Public Market

For decades, public markets were the great equalizer of finance. Pension funds, employees, and individual investors could all – at least in theory – participate in the creation of corporate wealth. That openness is fading fast. Fewer companies go public; those that do, wait longer. The most dynamic returns are increasingly captured in private markets, long before the IPO bell rings.

Private equity, venture capital, private debt: these have become the new frontiers of wealth creation. But they remain gated: accessible to institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals, rarely to ordinary savers. The result is a quiet siphoning of financial opportunity, a transfer of return potential from the public to the private sphere, from the many to the few.

Speculation for the Rest

For those excluded from the expanding private universe, new “future markets” offer something else: the thrill of prediction. Platforms such as Kalshi or Polymarket allow anyone to bet on the outcome of elections, weather patterns, or even cultural trends. Their rhetoric is one of democratization: markets for everyone, on everything.
But the data tell another story: liquidity is shallow, large “whale” trades dominate price discovery, and the asymmetry of capital and information mirrors that of traditional finance. These are not new avenues of wealth-building: they are new theaters of risk.

The Mirage of the Creator Economy

In parallel, millions are turning to the so-called creator economy, building audiences, brands, and livelihoods online. Its aggregate value exceeds $200 billion, and yet over half of creators earn less than $15,000 a year from their content. The distribution of income is as steep as in finance itself: a few stars, and a vast, invisible middle trying to reach subsistence level.
For most, it is not a new form of financial independence, it is a substitute for the job security that has vanished elsewhere.

Two Illusions, One System

On one side, a closed world of accredited investors compounding wealth behind opaque structures; on the other, an open world of “markets for everyone” and “creators of everything,” where access replaces security.
Both tell the same story: a financial system that has replaced inclusion with participation, and ownership with engagement. The illusion of access masks the reality of asymmetry.

Reclaiming Financial Openness

At Côme Maison of Finance, we see this as one of the defining questions of our time. Because the health of a financial system should not be measured only by its efficiency, but by the breadth of participation it allows.
Our role, as entrepreneurs of finance, as family officers, as investors, is to reopen those doors. To give access to what is truly generative: durable capital, shared opportunities, and transparent structures.
That is what we mean when we say Côme welcomes and grows all legacies, inherited, earned, or created. It is not just a statement of service, but of conviction: that finance should remain an instrument of transmission, not exclusion.

A Horizon

Private equity and debt are valuable financial instruments that don’t have to remain the preserve of an elite few – the initiative of Robinhood with its Ventures Fund I that aims to give individual investors exposure to firms before they go public is a step in the right direction. The markets may evolve, the formats of wealth may change, but the principle must remain the same: every fortune, large or small, deserves its home — and its horizon.