There are two distinct conceptual processes at work and it might be helpful to distinguish them.

While nature tends to be overall cyclical, reciprocal and feedback driven, we, as these mobile organisms circulating around the surface of this planet, tend to be linear and goal oriented.

The problem for the economy is that money functions as a medium of exchange, that circulates in order for markets to function. Yet we treat it as the signal to extract from the noise of society and the economy.

Consequently ever more has to be added and ever more inventive and counterproductive ways are created to store what has been extracted. As well as those with the largest piles can leverage it to acquire ever more.

So the financial sector has mutated from the mechanism which enables markets to function, to the God ruling over them and now in its final stages, the cancer consuming them.

Econ 101 tells us money is a medium of exchange, store of value and price setting mechanism, though the last is a function of being a medium.

Yet a medium is necessarily dynamic, while a store is static. Blood is a medium, while fat is a store. Roads are a medium, while parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, while the hall closet is a store. If your child confused the two, would you point out the difference? Yet Economics doesn’t seem to see the problem.

The functionality of money is in its fungibility. We own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the air and water passing through our bodies.

Essentially it mostly functions as a contract, with one side an asset and the other a debt. So in order to store the asset, similar amounts of debt have to be generated.

For one thing, this creates a centripetal effect, as positive feedback draws the asset to the center of the community, while negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges. Since finance effectively serves as the value distribution mechanism of the community, this is like the heart telling the hands and feet they don’t need so much blood and should work harder for what they do get.

The Ancients used debt jubilees to reset this process, but our culture has had both the benefit of enormous resources to exploit and a fairly short time frame to have done so, so it lacks this degree of perspective.

Another consequence is that government has become debtor of last resort. Given the Federal debt really started with the New Deal, not only was Roosevelt putting unemployed labor back to work, but unemployed capital, as well.

It could also be argued that it was not so much Volcker’s higher interest rates that cured stagflation, since that reduced capital to those willing to borrow and potentially grow the economy, as it was Reaganomics, which pulled surplus capital out of the markets and spent it in ways which didn’t compete with the private sector for profitable investments and primed the Keynesian pump.

Effectively the secret sauce of capitalism is that public debt backs private wealth. Ask yourself, if you think the markets could function without the government siphoning up a trillion dollars a year and pouring it back into such non-profitable investments, such as welfare and warfare?

The fact is that there are not sufficient viable investment opportunities to store the amount of notational value our system requires, for its future security.

Given that we save for many of the same reasons, such as housing, raising children, healthcare, retirement, etc, if these could be invested in directly, as community assets, then everyone trying to save for them individually, with their savings account as an economic umbilical cord, we would have to work together more effectively and possibly generate healthier societies and environments, rather than using them as resources to plunder, in order to pad our individual cocoons.

I could go on, but it is a broad discussion and most people just want patches for the immediate problems, not resetting the entire paradigm;

https://medium.com/predict/peeling-the-paradigm-1ceab7e774b0