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If you are not in the stock market your investments will barely keep up with inflation. The market can be a win-win situation, as opposed to gambling, because good companies increase their real value over time. I believe that the fat cats of wall street have a great tendency to try to shift their losses to their middle class investors, and/or to the government. So how does the small investor avoid being used as an insurance policy for the fat cats? Buying and holding is one way, and avoiding the big wall street operators as vehicles for investments.
The US has run out of Big New Ideas, temporarily. Financing the buying of a house is not, in the long run, a win-win situation. A house is not a profit-making investment like a new technology or a factory. It can only "make money" if house prices rise rapidly. That is self-limiting because incomes to pay for those houses only can rise with productivity. So for a few years the fat cats made it look good by running a scam, which enriched them, but screwed the rest of us. An awful lot of us were seduced by the "moral hazard" of the easy mortgages the sleaze balls created. Hillary's call for a bail out has to be looked at with jaundiced eye. Who does she want to bail out? Those funds that bought the mortgages could easily bail out the mortgagees. Of course that would drive down the "value" of the investment. Tough luck.
