American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

That's called "theft". In a free market, transactions are mutually agreed upon. Equal wealth for equal wealth.

> Wealth creation only works when the the money available to buy wealth creating instruments is significantly less than the value of those instruments.

Your statement presumes that "value" is some construct independent of the market. The only "value" in commerce is what someone is willing to pay for it. There is no other useful definition of value.

As for how wealth is created, I buy a canvas and some paint for $50, and paint a masterpiece that Ritchie Rich buys from me for $10,000. I created that wealth. Taylor Swift figured out how to turn her song skillz into a billion dollars. She created that wealth. Musk figured out how to turn hunks of metal into rockets that are quite profitable. He created that wealth. And so on.

> How would markets behave if investment accounts had more cash in them than there were investment vehicles?

Now that is a complex topic. But I'll make a simple take on it. When there is more cash than things to buy, then the value of the cash diminishes. We call that "inflation". Wealth creation does not cause inflation.

As for private equity, nobody is making you invest in it.

the Cold War apocalypse was solely military in nature which had few implications economically, whether you get nuked or not doesn't change an investors strategy, you just assume the world doesn't end and carry on. The cold war calculus was if anything maybe the most rationally (albeit scary) period of human history, but exceptionally stable.

There is a difference between billionaires being afraid of the communists, which was of course self-serving, hysteric and at times bigoted, but the communists were at least real and had killed some few ten million people. That's a very different form of apocalyptic thinking than billionaires giving lectures on the actual Anti-Christ in the Vatican.

Economic manias happen in periods of social transformation and hot war, not cold ones. And on that front we do look a lot more like we are in the 1920s, or some bizarre 19th century evangelical revivalism period rather than the 1960s.