Got stocks?

If so, you likely are feeling much better about things these days, as the major averages notch fresh all-time highs about once every other day. This, to some, is what a recovery looks like.

Not so fast. According to a Gallup poll, the percentage of Americans saying they hold individual stocks, mutual funds or stocks within a retirement account fell to 54 percent in April 2011 — the lowest level since the polling outfit started asking, in 1999.

Owning a piece of corporate America by buying shares through a stock market has always been wise counsel — unless you bought in 2007, in which case you are just now breaking even (if you didn’t sell in a panic while the whole thing was tanking in 2008). But if you consult a price chart that looks at a century of returns, it ispretty much a straight line up.

The reason? When corporations need to post solid earnings to satisfy investors, their leeway is to cut costs when business is soft. When we say “costs,” read “jobs.”

Corporations have been meeting investors’ bottom line even throughout the Great Recession. So why aren’t more people taking part? And should they, now that the market is again on an upward trajectory?

When you look at who owns stocks, generally it is the most risk-tolerant. When we say “risk-tolerant,” we mean those who are wealthy and diversified into many different asset classes. There are more wealthy people these days, but in the stagnant ranks of the middle and lower classes, most every penny goes into the gas tank, the dinner table or the mortgage.

But even the wealthy have reason to be scared. If at 2:45 p.m. on May 6, 2010, you owned 1,000 shares of Procter & Gamble — one of the most stable U.S. blue-chip stocks ever — it was worth $61,000. Twenty minutes later, it was worth $47,000.

Can you afford to lose $14,000 in 20 minutes? Few can, but the so-called “flash crash” is a big part of why average Americans are turning away from stocks. It’s a crisis of confidence — both in market technology and in financial data.

We don’t see how average Americans will be able to save for retirement without owning at least some U.S. equities. And that’s a problem.

Have you looked at your CD or passbook savings interest statement lately? Banks are borrowing at 0 percent, lending near 5 percent and giving out 0.25 percent to savers. In effect, even as the Federal Reserve is all but forcing people into riskier investments such as stocks, fewer people are taking the bait.

It’s encouraging, on one hand, to see people learned from the financial crisis: avoiding excessive credit, being wary of ersatz trading data, seeking preservation — not gains — of capital.

But banks have not been held to the same standards. And if Congress continues to scuttle the Frank-Dodd financial reform law and frustrate attempts to instill the Volcker Rule or to re-establish the Glass-Steagall Act that once prevented big banks frOm gambling with depositors’ money, we will lose out on the chance to reinstill confidence in our nation’s equities markets.

To not do so wouldn’t only be unfair, it would be stacking the deck in favor of the wealthiest, while endangering the health of retirement incomes in a nation where the concept of retirement is facing extinction.

Nest eggs have been cracked and served as souffle to big banks that got bailed out for their excesses. Homeowners were left to tread water.

The government has egg on its face if it believes the current financial regulatory regime isn’t tilted toward the wealthy. It needs to ignore Wall Street largesse and begin to put the Humpty Dumpty stock market back together again.

Then, as new highs are reached, more people can benefit.