For example, I use to work for a company as a wage earner. I left, moving my 401k into a self-directed IRA. Since the market has been bad lately, I remained in cash. I want to put that money somewhere else: property.
I would love to buy a building downtown (which is theoretically possible). I would convert the top floor, about 5k sq/ft, into a co-work office that charges $10/day. The first floor I would rent out to someone, like a grocer. Sadly, the system works against this dream.
First, I can't use the building directly if I purchased it with the IRA. I, as the IRA holder, cannot utilize any properties within the account directly. There goes the co-work. I can't put sweat equity in because that is an illegal contribution. There goes fixing the building without loosing money on labor. I can't directly take the checks and deposit them in the IRA. The law requires that all checks go directly to IRA holding company (who will take a percentage). Finally, I have to get a special IRA account that holds property. Trick is that there is almost no one that does that since they don't make a lot of money. The few that do, take a big chunk.
So I, as a lowly wage earner, can't tap my largest asset directly. I can only use my money to feed the pockets of others via stocks and bonds.
As the Simpson's sung, "It's the American way!"
As a national program, it's better if your pension is delayed, rather than your investment completely failing and you becoming homeless and sick at 62.
Preferential tax treatment for retirement savings accounts was created with the the specific intention of encouraging people to save for retirement, in order to minimize the extent of poverty among senior citizens. It is a feature, not a bug, that these accounts make it difficult to speculate, because the speculation decisions of amateurs and even most professionals are provably, demonstrably worse in aggregate returns than buy-and-hold passive investment in the overall economy.
If you want to speculate on real estate, you are free to do so. You just have to pay taxes on the money used to do so, so that the government can afford to rescue you from poverty if you fail.
> Since the market has been bad lately, I remained in cash.
For the record, buying at the top of the market and cashing out in downturns is the maximally wrong investment strategy. A random number generator would in general outperform this strategy, because at least some of the time it would do anything but that.
Except that IRAs do let people invest their retirement savings in risky speculative investments like buy-to-let properties - they just have to give the IRA holding company a cut of they money in fees and pay someone else to deal with the repairs and maintenance, both of which have the effect of making their returns worse.
That's a highly competitive market filled with deep pockets and thin margins.
Since that is not the case, you can presume there is not money out there not yet tapped. Which, considering economic trends in recent decades towards wealth concentration in the same capitalist class who has nothing to spend money on except making more money nowadays, that should be no surprise.
When the consumers are getting poorer, their demand is dropping, not increasing, so there is no reason to ever try increasing supply. Just use monetary loopholes to profit more instead.
* : all relative to risk. There are of course things you could take large risks on and see incredible returns if you succeed, but you cannot predict or even guarantee success on them (gene therapy, new silicon fab tech, nuclear energy, new solar panel tech, better battery tech, AI, and way, way more). When the board is awash in cash from a perpetual money machine, and you could easily just do stock buybacks to make shareholders happy, you go with the no risk easy route to appease shareholders than taking the risk.
Companies are doing buybacks because the Fed is basically siphoning all the wealth to big business and the Government via 0 per cent interest rates.
In the past companies had to offer their stock in exchange of savings. Today The central banks basically finance big corp and Government just printing money(and diluting the currency).
So instead of using your savings, the central banks create new money and give it to their friends at 0 per cent interest rates(lower than inflation, aka: free money).
Their friends take that loan and buy their own shares. That way prices remain up without plunging enough time for the CEO of the company to look like a superstar and nobody complying when she retires with a billion dollars in golden parachutes.
Wow, you managed to put almost every misinformed finance meme into a single paragraph.