[quanticle]

>Most wealthy individuals aren't holding cash, they put the money in a savings account or investment that has a return.

Not necessarily true, given what the yields on savings accounts have been recently. Yes, a completely rational actor will invest capital in whatever market is currently generating the highest rate of return. But people are not rational actors. More specifically, people tend to be extremely loss averse - they will go to far greater lengths to avoid a result of -$1 than they will go to achieve a result of +$1, even though the delta (a dollar either way) is exactly the same for both situations. This loss aversion only gets worse when you scale up the numbers to -$1,000,000 and +$1,000,000.

This is why higher levels of inequality are correlated with lower growth. Capital owning rentiers are entirely happy with a 2% (or less) rate of return, so long as the risk of a negative rate of return is negligible. Meanwhile entrepreneurs who can generate much higher rates of return (but with a correspondingly higher probability of negative returns) are starved for capital.