As in, money, a.k.a. “liquidity.”
This in their review of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report:
Postmortems on the financial crisis: The official verdict | The Economist.
A criticism of three of the refuseniks–that the report fails to take proper account of the weight of global capital seeking returns by investing in American mortgages–is absolutely fair. Ask people in property what caused the crisis and the answer will invariably be the amount of liquidity in the system.
Emphasis mine.
1.Too much of our national income, savings, and wealth has been funneled off to circulate in the expanding whirlpool of the financial economy, instead of circulating in the real economy where people produce, consume, invest in, buy, and sell actual goods and services that are of value to humans.
2. At the same time, since the 1980s massive quantities of money/liquidity have been manufactured out of thin air (“printed”: primarily by financial institutions, with help from the government) and injected into the financial economy instead of the real econonomy.
See the first link above for details.