I shouldn't have name dropped that particular book since I haven't read it, only summaries/reviews of it. But the question still remains of how "rich people in

I shouldn't have name dropped that particular book since I haven't read it, only summaries/reviews of it. But the question still remains of how "rich people invest in the economy". Do they really? Or is it entirely indirect? Not one of them is giving small farmers money to buy tractors. Maybe they're building hotels which eventually employ housekeepers, sure. That's what I think of as the general economy. There's probably a more specific technical term for this. But I think using a billion dollars to give small farmers loans would be the worst possible use for it. You'd probably speculate in oil futures or whatever. While it's technically all the economy, sure, I'd argue that the super-wealthy generally don't add much to the economy, they extract value from the economy using their existing wealth as leverage. What I'm getting at is that money spent on stuff/food/buildings/etc is different than money used as a tool/leverage/instrument just to make more money. I get the sense that it's an entirely different game (again, mostly an intuition from reading a lot of commentary about economic issues). Sure, we all earn money and pay rent in dollars. Those dollars and that activity are only tangentially related to what a hedge fund uses dollars for.