>Or what if these central bankers are geniuses manipulating the quantum mechanics of our economy in a way that will just always seem like nonsense to outsiders.
If you think deeper into it, you will see that the U.S. economy does not exist in a closed loop. For instance, most of the physical goods we use gets produced in China. The profits from producing them flow back, since purchasing real estate in the politically stable "West" is much more reasonable than holding your capital in China where you can get killed over it. A similar process happens to the Saudi oil money and the VC market. Although it might look like the central bankers have found a wonderful way to make money from thin air and make everyone happy, I think we are actually just slowly selling off strategic assets to the external buyers and spending the proceeds to buy trinkets.
In America the ownership of real estate is not an absolute right. Your property can be taken by eminent domain, by failure to pay fines, or more commonly it can be taken due to failure to pay property and/or income taxes.
If they ever need to get the foreign owners out they will set a tax on foreign owned real estate for an amount makes the investment not worthwhile.
Except the economy is getting more and more dependent on that external money. Good luck banning foreign owners if 20% of your state GDP is real estate deals (real numbers for British Columbia; they also tried foreign buyer tax, although the Chinese figured out some loopholes). Good luck banning foreign investments if millions of local jobs exist solely to make the companies look like better investments, and millions more are tied to advertising, accounting, cloud and other services provided to VC-backed companies.
You can't stop the slowly accumulating long-term effects without a considerable mid-term depression, and no politician will go for it because the majority of voters is very short-sighted.
The global economy is closed yet it can grow due to technical progress. (Better ways to organize trade, production, life, etc. More specialization more efficiency for the whole system, comparative advantages coupled with trade compound for every trading partner.)
Central banks manage the money supply simply by keeping track of this growth process. (Via closely watching prices, trying to stabilize them, and trying to keep unemployment low at the same time.)
No need to sell off "assets". Changing ownership of capital doesn't matter for economics (naturally public choice economics and developmental economics deals with politics, monopolies and other pathological market states, which cab arise from too much power/capital consolidation.)
The whole system definitely gets more efficient, but it renders entire populations obsolete. The economic role of an average millennial in the West is currently to just get out of the way and be happy with some minimal amount of money that isn't much correlated with their personal efficiency. No motivation to grow, no paths to house ownership, questionable chances of ever affording a family - so the entire generation is pretty much sitting in depression and waiting to die of old age.
Why ... why do you think there's nothing for people to do? There are new kinds of jobs invented by young folks every week. From influencer to vlogger to artisan fart crafter to who knows what.
Sure, it's not as simple as it used to be, that just go to school and work in the factory/office. But that's not the end of the world.
Service industries are booming. Remote work is the way to go. No need to buy a house for 1M USD somewhere near SF/LA and commute every day.
And it works. There are people living in vans wherever they wish and living off money made by content creation.
The problem of looming doom is not because of the economy. It's entirely because there's a culture war going on. Mental health is the first casualty.
The entire generation is waiting for the old guard to die out, so they can enact reforms. (Except as we know reality is a lot more complicated, there are plenty of young folks rooting for both sides, and actively participating in politics.)
If you think deeper into it, you will see that the U.S. economy does not exist in a closed loop. For instance, most of the physical goods we use gets produced in China. The profits from producing them flow back, since purchasing real estate in the politically stable "West" is much more reasonable than holding your capital in China where you can get killed over it. A similar process happens to the Saudi oil money and the VC market. Although it might look like the central bankers have found a wonderful way to make money from thin air and make everyone happy, I think we are actually just slowly selling off strategic assets to the external buyers and spending the proceeds to buy trinkets.