"You're thinking of this place all wrong. As if I had the money back in a safe. The money's not here. Your money's in Joe's house...right next to yours. And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Macklin's house, and a hundred others. Why, you're lending them the money to build, and then, they're going to pay it back to you as best they can. Now what are you going to do? Foreclose on them?"

The whole point of finance, the social purpose, is that it prevents everyone (rich or not so rich) with assets from letting them sit idle.

The whole point of finance is to maximize returns on investment. One strong strategy is to build liquidity before economic (or industry) downturns to cheaply acquire assets. This idleness happens at a much greater rate for the wealthy than the poor. And by poor, I mean the bottom 90% of society. They don't have the luxury of savings. This means it's of greater value to give them money because they spend it quickly . The economy doesn't grow when companies buy back stock, it grows when someone has enough money to pay for medical treatments or to buy a new car.