I'll start with what I assume is an unpopular opinion here: I am not convinced that the field of finance is 100% bullshit. Yes, we all know about the prominent current example of how markets can fail, but (a) note that, in principle, the market does have a mechanism to punish the people who do too much short-selling, even if the capitalist class isn't currently letting that mechanism do its job, and (b) in the long run, we all know Gamestop stock isn't going to be at a high price forever, and one way or another it will eventually fall to the price it "should" be. Most of the time, markets are okay, perhaps even, dare I say, GOOD, at aggregating information from a wide variety of sources about the value and scarcity of things.

I think that many of the things finance is supposed to do -- e.g. distributing risk over time and space, allocating resources to promising technologies, incentivizing people to make bets that contribute to aggregated predictions about the future of the economy -- are good things that a socialist economy would need to have a good replacement for. At the very least, I think there's a baby in the bathwater here.

So, considering the things that I associate with "finance" in the capitalist country I live in (e.g. stock markets, insurance, banking, venture capital) what alternatives have past and current socialist countries used?