An alternative narrative. This is classical economic group behavior near the top of a bubble. The fed has long goosed its lending programs with cheap money, in an effort to stimulate investment, and to avoid the spectre of spiraling deflation that they were worried would happen after the short deflation of 2009. Capitalists have then, rationally gone out in search of investments to yield a return. However, innovation is a limited resource at any given time, and we're close to tapping out on the amount of possible innovation. Moreover, realizing the full capacity of innovation is limited by the structure of society, wherein identifying entrepreneurs with actual potential is overtaken by identifying artificial 'signals' or 'tropes' of entrepreneurs: lots of false positives, charlatans, people with connections, or people who just got lucky once, are getting money, yields are decreasing.
Accordingly, as capitalists identify that it is becoming difficult to find real investments, their investment behavior decreases, just as the Fed is starting to pay banks to hold cash, to shore up reserves and make banks appear more resilient in the face of their "stress tests". This is artifical disinflation, but the worst type, because normally deflation helps the poor, but by the very mechanism of the current disinflation, it's going to the top. (Austrians: Why is giving money out disinflation? Because in this case it's tied to not lending, and private lending-based monetary expansion has a multiplier effect).
What to expect down the line:
A minor economic crisis as happens occasionally (black swans) will start triggering capitalists to start spending their cash reserves. As this spending hits the market, prices will go up, triggering inflation measures to start accurately reflecting the pent up monetary expansion that the Fed has undergone over the past 8 or so years. As the price of goods goes up, it will no longer make sense to hold onto cash, and moreover, the smart move will be to start investing in goods producers that can take advantage of these increasing prices.
We'll have an inflationary spiral spanning say 2016-2018. Don't worry, it won't be a Wiemar-republic level crisis, but it certainly will not be pleasant for the poorest Americans.
I probably have some details about the macroeconomics wrong, so we shall see whether my prediction comes true. I welcome counter-explanations, and corrections to what I have to say.