Regenerative Capital Markets: A Temporal Architecture for Long-Horizon Corporate Value

Capital markets misallocate resources because capital cycles are bound to short-horizon fragility cycles rather than to the long-horizon mission cycles that govern real economic value. Quarterly earnings windows, redemption flows, executive tenure compression, political turnover and sentiment volatility jointly impose on capital a temporal regime that is shorter, more volatile and exogenous to productive investment. This paper applies Regenerative Cycle Architecture and its two operators — decoupling (Δ) and alignment (Λ) — to formalise the result as temporal market misalignment, and shows that no traditional market instrument satisfies either operator. Short-termism follows as a structural consequence of cycle coupling rather than as a behavioural or informational pathology, which is why governance reform, stewardship codes and investor education do not reach it. The paper then proposes Regenerative Capital Markets (RCM): a temporal constitution for private capital comprising multi-cycle capital pools, mission-cycle reporting, cadence-matched capital release and cycle-aligned executive incentives. This rebuild separates the two halves, because they do not have the same standing. The negative result is argued and holds. The positive result is stipulated: the source asserts that RCM satisfies Δ and Λ, constructs a model in which that is assumed, and then reports it as demonstrated. The rebuild also repairs a defect that bore on whether the proposed architecture could exist at all — asset lifetime was classified as both a fragility cycle and a mission cycle, so Δ and Λ imposed contradictory requirements on the same object. Removing capability from the fragility set resolves it at no cost, because that cycle was two mission cycles counted twice.