The top x% have been so ingrained with the idea that their money must be <i>invested</i> rather than <i>spent</i> that there is now a sort of economic Schwarzschild radius for money, and the rich have brought all their wealth inside of it.  Then it does not leave.<p>The best investments require healthy businesses, which require supplier production and consumer spending, which are uses of money that compete with investments.  If everyone who can afford a Tesla roadster would prefer to buy Tesla stock, then the investment never pays off, because Tesla can&#x27;t <i>actually sell</i> enough roadsters.  Eventually, someone has to <i>buy</i> something.  Buying a piece of the company that makes a thing is not the sake as buying the thing it makes.  One is actually beneficial economic activity, and the other is just moving money from one pocket to another in the same pair of pants.<p>All those loans given out for education and housing are not <i>spending</i>.  They are just new ways to launch money out on outward trajectories such that it will inevitably return.<p>Once you are rich enough that you can&#x27;t conceivably <i>spend</i> all your money via normal living expenses, you have a choice: accumulate even <i>more</i> money that can&#x27;t be spent, or spend it on abnormal expenses.  You can use your money to get more money, or you can use it to buy things that no one else can.  You can buy paper from Fannie Mae and Sallie Mae, or you can build a better electric car.  You can shuffle paper, or you can eradicate malaria.  You can shuffle paper, or you can give a condom to every person on Earth that does not want to get HIV today.  You can shuffle paper, or you can buy the swankiest, shiniest luxury yacht ever made.  You can shuffle paper, or you can overthrow the government that murdered your grandparents.  You can shuffle paper, or you can make sure that your local zoo can afford a new habitat for some threatened animal to whom you feel inexplicably connected.<p>We get bubbles when the people with money to spare only want to <i>invest</i> in the things that <i>other people</i> are <i>spending</i> their money on.  Those people should not be investing.  They should be making things to sell, or buying them, rather than trying to make the people who are doing those things indebted to them somehow.