Earlier this week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit twenty-thousand points — the first time the famed stock market index has reached that level since its inception in 1896. The twenty-thousand-point landmark is arbitrary and meaningless, but it does provide an occasion to reflect upon who owns the stock market and thus who benefits when it performs well.

Of course, families are not the only ones who own stocks. Foundations, endowments, and pension funds also typically invest in the stock market, at least in part. But the benefits that flow to these entities from a run-up in stock value only trickle down to ordinary people in certain idiosyncratic cases, such as when a defined-benefit pension fund might otherwise become distressed or insolvent.

The fact is, the vast majority of the stock market is held by a small fraction of the richest and wealthiest people in the country, and that is who benefits when it booms.

Basic economics teaches us not to dwell so much on this kind of inequality, because the stock market is used to raise funds for important capital investment. But, as Doug Henwood and others have shown, the stock market doesn’t actually operate this way. When companies need money to expand production and investment, they usually look first to their own retained profits, second to banks for loans, third to the corporate bond market, and then, only in relatively rare cases, to the stock market.

In the real world, the stock market exists mostly to provide an outlet for early investors to cash out and for those with lots of money to speculate on stock price movements.

So while Wall Street may be cheering the Dow Jones’s upward climb, workers have very little to celebrate.