Even during the darkest days of the "lost decade" in Japan their companies never gave up on manufacturing and innovating. There were struggles, failures, but also successes. In that time Sony managed to dominate televisions and, later on, game consoles.
The level of utter destruction the US economy will face if it continues to double down on hedge-fund style acquisition/mergering of every one plus dog is hard to fathom, but it will be considerable. The remaining manufacturers are being managed into the ground, everything they do is being out-sourced, "streamlined", and systematically destroyed.
I wouldn't be surprised if the handful of companies that still make things in the US, like Ford, Boeing, and General Electric, are bought up, "reorganized" and sold off piecemeal, squeezing some juicy shareholder value out of them before throwing out the husk.
You have to do more than "invest" in things in order to have a functional economy. Shares don't employ people, sales of product and services do, and if people can't afford those products or services because you laid them all off as a cost-saving measure then you're doomed.
I wouldn't build something unless there was demand for it and a profitable business model. If people can't pay for it then demand doesn't matter, you won't make money, so you shouldn't invest in the first place.
Capital alone doesn't do anything.
When you have demand and a profitable business model then capital can help you, but it's a tricky balance between too much capital and too little. If you raise too much money then the investors will be clamouring for returns you can't deliver on. If you raise too little you'll be starved for capital and stunt your growth.
The real problem is when it's all about capital, when you ignore everything else. If your only goal is to create more of it then you're going to have no qualms about driving businesses into the ground if you can make money doing it. That helps only a small group of people and causes a massive amount of trouble for others.
