For several years now, most investors have considered stocks the "only game in town." Interest rates have plummeted so low that most people have not enjoyed leaving too much money in bank accounts (not unless you consider 1.01% a healthy return on your savings account, for example).

So an enormous amount of money has poured into the stock market from every source, national and international. The people who have sold the stocks for all that money have used most of their profits to buy even more stocks. As it sucks more and more of our investments, the market has ballooned to gigantic proportions.

If the stock market should crash, what happens to the wealth?

In a day, people would have gone through holding trillions of dollars in negotiable instruments, to hardly anything. Who gets the money they lose?

The wealth of a nation has disappeared, millions of American stockholders have lost fortunes, and no one seems to have recovered the abundance from them. A few people who bet on the market going down will obviously do well, but that would account for no more than a tiny portion of the vanished wealth.

Here's some clues:

The total supply of money won't have changed. The same number of greenbacks remain on the market. And don't worry too much about the people and institutions holding the cash. The law prohibits banks from investing their deposits in substantially anything but U.S. government securities and other banks. So they're still sitting on the cash, but you can't sell stocks to repay your loans. Sure, their loan losses will increase, but they'll repossess your home and car to help mitigate the impact on them.

Another clue: Remember supply and demand? If you take two inversely related resources, such as stocks and money, then price of one relative to the other will rise or fall depending upon the availability and demand. And considering money as a commodity, the greater the demand for it, the higher its price (in stocks or anything else that can be sold for money).