An analogy for the desperate looking for employment, colluding to suppress wages across the industry, skewed supply-demand ratios in their favor. Take your pick.

I think 1 and 3 are the same thing, but collusion sounds like it would be much more of a cheat code. Still, if it's not clear which one of those things they meant, then whatever they were implying is totally lost, and it's not a good place to use an analogy.

enough money to throw around

These companies generally do still have money to throw around.

Financialization. The capability to create "today money" from "tomorrow money" at extremely low levels of perceived risk. Sometimes we dip our webbed flippers into the idea of negative risk, with predictable - but extremely today-dollar-rific - results.

Offtopic, but this magical money-generation capability is commonly perceived as a standin for any value-generation capability, from aerodynamics to materials science. Go wander the C-Suite of a major aerospace firm and count the engineering degrees, then go back and count the MBAs. It's every bit as absurd as late-stage Soviet Russia injecting "Socialism" into fields like fluid dynamics.

If this disagrees with anyone's ideology, I preemptively apologize. Go ahead and throw stuff at the monitor.

I missed out on the property boom at a personal level because I was not taught the value of debt. So I get your point. We didn't purchase a home because it always seemed like a bubble that simply could not inflate further. All the while, property prices went up, up and up. (referring to Canadian housing)

So mistake made, lesson learned. In a world where money is expensive (fed rate sets the lowerbound), where are the opportunities?

I am not an investing genius or even a decent layman - I am prone to episodes of terrible personal injury - but the obvious answer seems to be "destroy the future, short the present".

Here's a trick, though: if you don't believe in the future, how do you cash out of the present, or out of anything? Now we move into the shadow realm of metaphor and ideology. This has been a pretty big deal since at least 1972, and more urgently since 2008, when all kinds of super-weird-ass money tricks were spawned.