Trade makes us richer if it's motivated by both parties coming out ahead in their judgment. Spending for the sake of spending, or for the sake of "stimulating the economy", doesn't help anything.
People who say "In this economy we need more money being spent" are not capitalists advocating efficient trade, they're Keynesians or something.
If someone thought he would benefit from a purchase, he would do it without encouragement. So what meaning can the encouragement to spend have...?
Conceivably it could mean (but this guy did not mean) that there's lower hanging fruit to be found by looking for more trades that should happen but aren't than by producing more. But it's far from obvious how/why that would be true "in this economy". In economic slowdowns, you need to make more stuff, not divvy up the too-little stuff more perfectly. It's when the economy is booming and production is very high that there might more plausibly be a neglect of the efficiency of trading.