You either do industry or finance. If the general trend, not only Boeing was this: > Money that could have been spent investing in workers or products instead

You either do industry or finance. If the general trend, not only Boeing was this: > Money that could have been spent investing in workers or products instead went straight to investors then you were doing finance. So you pillage company after company and you couldn't care less about them, much like companies are said not to care much about the people working for them. Then those pillaged companies start to fail at delivering good products because they don't have the resources to build them or the board doesn't actually care about products. They coasts and run on fumes for a while, then fail. Finance moves on to the next victims. You apply this to a whole country and you eventually have some very rich people in a country without a meaningful industrial base and a lot of very poor people around you. Maybe you move to some paradise abroad where poor and angry people can't touch you. You left a wasteland behind. Congratulations. You won the game or you lost it, it depends on what was the game.