The Decline of the Publicly Traded Firm

A long Felix Salmon post boiled down to a single bold hypothesis: "the total number of listed companies, which has been falling steadily for a decade, will continue to fall for the foreseeable future."

I can't prove it, obviously, but I suspect he's right. There's always been something somewhat illogical about organizing the economy around publicly traded firms (I think Keynes said that investment decisions shouldn't be the byproduct of a casino) and innovations like high-frequency trading and ETFs tend to heighten the contradictions. Does anyone think the mainstream corporate governance model is a stunning success? Oftentimes I think we implicitly assume that no fundamental innovations in the institutional structure of representative market democracies will take place, but also this stuff was invented in the past and may well be superseded.