We live in a monetary credit community, in which billions of dollars are created, year by year, so as to help prime the gears of the wheels in order to keep the American economy humming and growing. Those that run American's central banking consortium, the Federal Reserve, talk a very good game and try to give the impression to the susceptible public that the economic minutiae that they study and process, makes everything that they do, appear to be of sound basis and common sense.
The bottom line is that when dollars are created, those dollars should most appropriately be utilized in constructive ways that help the American public and the economy, in whole. At least, that should be the general theory, but the reality of the situation is that when monetary credit increases at a greater rate than what should be occurring or is necessary, then those monetary assets are ultimately going to be mal-invested, of which the primary source of such mal-investment is not to take that money and invest it into the infrastructure of America, which may not show any immediate return of that money in the sense of a traditional return on investment, or at least not directly; but rather to take the easy and greedy road, of simply investing those excess funds into the mania of the stock market casino, recognizing that speculating in that way, is very much a confidence game, of a belief, that the prices of stocks, ever rise, until they do not.
Again, monetary capital is required for businesses and economies to grow, but there is a world of difference between money being utilized to purchase goods, materials, infrastructure, labor, or research and development, that are productive for that business or country, as compared to money being "invested" into a corporation, via stock trading, in which, all that has really occurred is that one stockholder has traded shares for money, only to take that money and trade it once again for stock, in which the object of the exercise, is for the price of those underlying stocks to inexorably go up, even though fundamentally the business of that corporation represents less and less real relevance to the price of the underlying stock.
All of this money that should be utilized constructively to make this nation more vibrant and stronger, as well as to keep the people fully employed at a fair wage, is often misdirected into purely speculative measures, in which, that speculation is basically done on the spurious reasoning, that if the equities so being invested in are traded in a manner in which they always go up, than those speculators are ever getting richer. To a certain degree this theory works, until such a time arrives, as it invariably does, when the confidence game of the stock market casino, loses its confidence, and those easy speculators, take the easy way out, by selling and no longer reciprocating such sales with buying, leading to the inevitable result from such easy speculation, which is the crash, and the higher those stock prices are and the longer such excess speculation has gone on, the bigger is that crash.
While it is true that in this modern era, countries can just manufacture money -- that money ultimately is worth only what is being materially manufactured, produced, and utilized; so that excess money that is mal-invested is the equivalency of money that is just being burned.