No. It's about manufacturing and production of real goods. WWII Germany had wealth, and they actually had manufacturing. What they ran out of was resources. They couldn't manufacture, because they didn't have raw materials. In a war, gold can't buy the weapons you need from your enemy, and paper money certainly can't. Nor can money buy you anything In a global recession. When production of tangible goods fails, money becomes worthless. You can't eat gold.

We seem to be working with different definitions for "wealth".

I meant wealth in the sense of goods, products, services, buildings, infrastructure, plumbing.. basically everything that's available to you and serves or supports your goals somehow.

It seems you may have interpreted "wealth" as roughly the same as "money".

Services aren't production. Sure, services have value.

I didn't say services are production, but that they are produced (and serve as "wealth"). Yes, they have value.

But tangible goods exist and persist. Services don't. Most of the so-called "service industry" is luxury anyway. Fast food workers? Cashiers? Masseuses?

There are services related to manufacturing too. But you could argue that even a service like a massage has productive value if it enables you to be more productive.

Mali has fifteen million people who could be trivially trained to provide services. The country is in abject poverty because it lacks resources, and it lacks manufacturing.

If a country is in abject poverty, it's fundamentally because its rulers have looted and pillaged the people too hard. It's really simple: The freer people are to produce wealth, the more wealth gets produced. Of course, people need to rest assured that they'll get to enjoy the fruits of their labour too, because otherwise they wouldn't bother with producing.

For example, if you're starting a business in Russia, be prepared for the state to just confiscate it if it gets profitable enough. Strangely enough, Russia is a shithole.

Exporting services might be possible, but India is currently a huge, failing counterexample.

What were you getting at with that paragraph though?

Completely theoretical, and completely wrong. Depressions and recessions are bad, in practice.

I was just talking about an increase in purchasing power being a good thing. That is very much accurate by itself. You mixed that up with other issues that are unclear. If you want to start from a set of premises and reason through things, feel free to present a scenario, but you'll find that problems in economies are always ultimately caused by political power.