You greatly overestimate how many americans have pension plans and underestimate how rich the richest americans are
The low interest rates we've experienced over the last decade, which have only gotten lower as of late, have actually blown up retirement plans.
Used to be, $500,000 saved at 8% meant you could retire off the $40k interest + social security. It also meant that growing a savings account into $500,000 was not out of reach, even on a modest income. This was the plan many people in the 60's, 70's, 80's worked towards.
Now, getting to $500k in savings is much more difficult as compound interest is so much lower. And if you happened to get there, you'd earn a whopping $5000, maybe less, in interest per year.
The best you could hope for is a younger generation of increasingly productive new workers being able to spin off enough profits to provide a return on the capital that generated that productivity. But the demographic time-bomb of relatively few Homelanders supporting relatively many Baby Boomers is going to upend that, and the stagnating productivity of the last couple decades isn't going to help.
Banks use deposits to create loans whose funds go directly to the companies receiving those loans. Banks which interview the loan applicants, review financials, ask for references, and which themselves tend to be pillars of the community (before the proliferation of national banks) and have a vested interest in helping it to thrive.
So, no, your premise is 180 degrees wrong. Savers were once paid high interest rates precisely because their dollars were necessary to directly fund risky investments like a new business or expansion. The bank's function was to determine high vs low risk and allocate depositors' money efficiently. Meanwhile, buying an index fund or Amazon stock and having a few irrelevant proxy votes on decisions already made, is the definition of "stashing" it away with zero utility.
There would be no IPO market without a secondary market. Almost nobody is interested in buying a stock at IPO and holding it forever without being able to sell it.
But they can issue new stock at the inflated values to fund expansion, which itself allows the company to grow profits and potentially grow future dividends. E.g. Tesla stock price quadrupled over the last year and then Tesla issued $2 billion worth of new shares in February.
that's absolutely not true.
The buying stocks (or indirectly via index funds) must mean somebody else is selling.
The person who sold the stocks will put the money obtained from the sale to use somewhere else. It moves capital just like any other economic transaction.
It may be that the seller will "just" buy another stock - and it looks like nothing's changed. But eventually a seller down the chain is either going to invest in something other than stocks (e.g., a bond), buy new IPO stocks, or to consume the money (e.g., retiree selling stocks to fund their living cost).
The problem with banks doing loaning is that they have to be conservative. They cannot loan out money that might not return - since they must return their depositor's money.
Investors, on the other hand, do not have this conservatism (for the right price). That's why stocks exist, and that's why bonds exist (for those willing to risk less than stocks).
The point being, `eanzenberg`'s idea that money in a savings account just sits there idly doing nothing, is false.
after all, a bank cannot invest in risky assets. "eventually down the chain [of stock investments]" is very fast in terms of timing, and i guarantee you it is faster than a bank's loan process for small businesses.