Scalable Founder: Growing Inequality Can Only Be Alleviated Through Stock Market Participation

Erik Podzuweit, founder of the neobroker Scalable (which profits from fund investments and trading), is urging Germans to invest more in funds on the stock market. Currently, only one-fifth of people over the age of 14 in Germany have an active investment account with an equity fund—according to Podzuweit, it’s realistic to expect that number to double soon. This would also help narrow the growing gap between the rich and the poor—since the wealthy are invested in stocks, while those with lower incomes are hardly invested at all, if at all. Low-income earners in particular—if they set aside any money at all—put it into supposedly safe checking accounts, savings accounts, or time deposits, whose returns, however, are eroded by inflation in the long term, unlike funds that yield average returns.
Better financial education in schools would also be desirable—though this is unlikely to happen. However, the internet offers good educational alternatives. After all, people under 40 today are more interested in building their financial knowledge than ever before…