I know it’s not quite that simple,

It's kinda worse than that. The US financialized the luxury homes and casinos and sports stadiums. So they're paying a vig on a vig to give a tiny minority the 1980s conception of luxury.

Enormous sums of money just get recirculated into speculative investment. This has created the cryptocurrency surge - yet another layer of speculative investment - and the ballooning investment in AI as a means of automating marketing and debt collection.

We've done the Economy That Just Makes Paperclips except without the paperclips.