[d4nt]

Convert “$x” into “something Alice wants”. Alice doesn’t really want $x, she wants a new car, a house, a vacation, a new machine for her factory.

Now “They want to (add, prevent from decay) as many edges as possible” becomes “They want to encourage different parties to lend each other things they want”.

[fmstack]

hold up hold up. there's a key distinction between the two categories of things you list in your examples. The first three are items that are consumed to meet Alice's specific desires, with features that match these desires-- a specific car, a specific house, a specific vacation. Alice buys them because she wants to use them.

In a sense Alice also buys physical capital to use them, but she's not using physical capital because of its specific qualities but instead because of the money the products it produces will fetch when sold on the market. Alice wants a vacation because she wants to go to Paris or New Zealand or whatever. Alice wants a machine part because she wants the money it will make her. Two very different categories of thing!

I bring this up not exactly as a critique of your analysis, but instead because none of the discussion in this thread is particularly tethered to the process of production, and it's specifically the disruption to production that makes the SVB collapse troubling.