You'd be best off dusting off one of those textbooks. The majority of financial transactions in share markets are sales of existing stock, and are not new equity investment into the company.

New equity investment into the company is investment in real assets, precisely when it is used to acquire real assets.

However, most "investment" does not finance the acquisition of new real assets ... most nets out inside the financial sector, with a holder of a financial assets swapping with a holder of money: neither an increase in financial assets nor an increase in liquidity, just a change in the distribution of an existing stock.

These are all neoliberal fantasies, repeated to provide ideological cover for the "promotion of saving", and to distract attention from the fact that on average, those that have money to save have more money than those that do not have money to save, and that "inducements to save" are a fancy way of saying welfare for the rich.

The Japanese acquire the services of very clever people to perform their financial capital allocation, just as the pommies and we yanks acquire the service of very clever people to perform our financial capital allocation. However, rather than paying them a slice off the top of the sums they are managing, they pay them a comfortable upper middle class income working in a Ministry, and they get that clever capital allocation for a small fraction of the cost that we pay for a casino system that allocates capital with a minority of its time and effort.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.