Exactly this. Selling stocks <=> Buying USD.

Are they buying bonds? Investing in foreign countries? Real estate? Gold? Crypto?

Holding cash is surely a losing bet I doubt we will see any deflation even if a shit ton of people lose their jobs.

That is indeed the question. I'm not one those sophisticated investor types. I'm more of a "stick it in a broad index fund and leave it there" guy with a side during high interest times of "have a fair amount in 3 to 18 month CDs and treasury bond/notes".

I'll be retiring in a few months, and because my house is paid off, my older ICE car is paid off, my new EV will be paid off soon, we have no state income tax and a great senior property tax relief program, and I don't have any expensive hobbies, my annual Social Security benefit will be about 50-60% more than my normal annual expenses. The difference should be enough to cover a new desktop computer every 5 years, a new iPhone every 4, a new iPad every 5, a new watch ever 4, a new car every 10, and deal with the occasional need to replace a major appliance with several hundred a month left over.

If Congress screws up Social Security by letting the trust fund run out I'll be old enough then that when I'm forced to start drawing on my retirement investments I probably won't have enough years left to actually run out of money, as long as I can reasonably preserve my investments until then. I don't even need my investments to beat inflation--it looks like I'll be fine even if they fall behind inflation as long as the inflation isn't too high for too long.

So it seems to me a good case can be made for getting out of stocks, or at least getting a significant majority out, and into something safer. The question then is where to put it that has very little risk of loss of principal but should at least try to counter inflation?

A partial explanation is that money flows to money-market funds & CDs. Reference: https://wolfstreet.com/2025/09/12/money-market-funds-cds-ame...

But let's not forget that is someone is selling stock and getting USD, someone else is buying and giving USD, so the overall effect may be limited.