Here's the problem: Shares and Money... you can't eat them, sleep under them, talk on them, or drive them. If the stock market goes 'up' in the absence of a growth in employment and real output of useful 'stuff' then we have just experienced inflation. If people trade stocks left and right without real growth in the production underlying the companies, some win, and some lose in a distribution game - but the stuff they are distributing stays the same. This is where economists have really failed us; they perceive the market basket as complicated and somewhat impenetrable, and they don't pay it enough attention. So they end up engineering systems that just multiply dollars or accelerate their circulation (same difference). That's what happened with housing, essentially... the market basket shifted as relative pricing changed... anyway, that's a much bigger story.