Because yield is only meaningful when considered in a context with risk, and many investing agents are risk averse enough to include a large amount of low-yield low-risk investments in their investment mixture.

Ergo, the only investments left worth making (>0% yield) are high risk. Treasuries and “safe” bonds are close enough to 0 that I round down for the purpose of this comment.

Apple has ~$250 billion in cash on hand. Berkshire Hathaway has $122 billion. Alphabet has ~$100 billion. Where do you invest when all that is left is the roulette table (sidenote: Alphabet should be making risky bets: Alpha Bet [Alpha is investment return above benchmark])?

Pretty much. Information availability has made the investing ecosystem efficient enough that pretty much anything worth doing gets funded, and it's hard to find unfunded things that are worth doing. Where do you invest in such a scenario? Well, in a broad mixture of structurally unrelated high-risk investments that have acceptable yield, with a fat anchor of very low risk, very low yield investments.

Alphabet does make risky bets, they spin off new companies constantly, and on their last earnings report lost about $1 billion/quarter on it.

What do you think happens to the money invested in bond offerings?

Well this is about companies borrowing money, so in this case returns to investors. Those investors then pay taxes in whatever country they reside in, and use a fraction of what remains to look for new investments.

As the article points out, money is moving around but that’s it.

Imagine what would happen if investors didn’t buy bonds?