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Does QE Cause Wealth Inequality?

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Re: Does QE Cause Wealth Inequality?

#121
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compounding returns makes growth exponential. When you look at it that way the rich guy is just further up the curve, but you're on the same trajectory. In your simple example (25% returns annualised) he's only 31 years ahead! Don't you just feel better now?

Let's do the math for compounding returns. Suppose 7% growth for 30 years, same Person A and B: $1000 * (1.07 ^ 30) = 7,612.25 $1,000,000 * (1.07 ^ 30) = 7,612,255.04 Proportionally, It's still 1000:1. So we see compounding doesn't change the relative difference. But now we're getting to absolute gap that's simply uncoverable by wage income, unless you can land in the professional management class, which effectively…

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Re: Does QE Cause Wealth Inequality?

#122
post #50

An important takeaway from the wealth inequality chart: every time that wealth inequality has substantially decreased in recent history was during a recession. Staving off recessions at all costs for political reasons is a horrible policy. Market cycles are natural; we don't live in a perfect world. Market forces clearing out the inefficiencies/rebalancing power in the economy is better for long term capital allocati…

Well... the people who have a job and lose it in a recession (and many do) really don't care whether overall wealth inequality is going down. They're being destroyed financially; they don't care that the rich are also taking damage.

Re: Does QE Cause Wealth Inequality?

#123
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now if I put a million dollars in the bank, I lose wealth due to inflation, so I'm incentivized to put it in a fund or something now, which is a lot riskier than bank interest. Yes, people investing in productive enterprise is actually better for real output, prices, and generally overall welfare.

Consumers buying is what drives production. Not investment. > better [...] prices, and generally overall welfare. How does investment do that? Plenty examples of the opposite can be found. I find those claims baseless.

Investment and low rates drives wages which drives consumption.

Investment also shifts aggregate supply to the right, which causes more output.

Re: Does QE Cause Wealth Inequality?

#124
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compounding returns makes growth exponential. When you look at it that way the rich guy is just further up the curve, but you're on the same trajectory. In your simple example (25% returns annualised) he's only 31 years ahead! Don't you just feel better now?

Let's do the math for compounding returns. Suppose 7% growth for 30 years, same Person A and B: $1000 * (1.07 ^ 30) = 7,612.25 $1,000,000 * (1.07 ^ 30) = 7,612,255.04 Proportionally, It's still 1000:1. So we see compounding doesn't change the relative difference. But now we're getting to absolute gap that's simply uncoverable by wage income, unless you can land in the professional management class, which effectively…

Sure, they'll always be ahead, but 1000x as wealth sounds pretty impossible compared to 'a lifetime or so of compound returns'.

Most people only need to build a $2-3M pot to be financially independent, be able to stop working, and still live better than most working Americans, which is the biggest quality of life improvement there is in acquiring wealth.

The utility of wealth falls off a cliff pretty quickly. Replacing a $200K/yr salary from passive income in perpetuity with a good level of certainty would require a pot of $6-7M

At 7% (above inflation), most people still need to spend 30 years saving 30% of their salary before they can reach a level (30x) that can replace it. 15% over 40 years also works.

Re: Does QE Cause Wealth Inequality?

#125

It doesn't necessarily, but there are some issues to think about: 1) Interest rates that are low mean that middle-class savings accounts don't grown in size. QE requires low interest rates as I understand it. 2) MMT is linked to QE but guess what, an oligarchic system isn't going to distribute QE capital to middle class and poor people, it's going to go into the pockets of the ruling class. In any case, you really ca…

I don't understand how higher interest rates on savings accounts would meaningfully impact the middle class. The median savings account balance is just $5,300[1]. And the thing about savings accounts is that they generally do get spent down periodically - they typically aren't used to continuously squirrel away cash for decades, so you're not compounding interest over the long term. You might save for 5 years and the…

I rarely see this spelled out, but in the more modern thinking, the working class are "creatures of flows", and the capitalist class are "creatures of stocks": i.e. the latter has meaningful assets, but the former subsists on wages.

Obviously this is just an approximation, but "class is calculus" is a very useful mental model.

By that ones, yes, the vast majority of people have negligible liquid savings. So the interest rate doesn't directly matter. Yet, the rich also "own the means of production" --- i.e. real assets, which also doesn't get inflated away. So it doesn't obviously matter for them. So what does it effect?

The essential original Keynesian insight (what most of the factions since might agree on), is that since the point of owning things in Capitalism as money, even if you aren't holding cash, the interest rate effects how easy it is to invest, but also what investments are productive w.r.t doing nothing. This spooky shit is what is supposed to give monetary policy it's power.

The differences in opinion in those factions come down to whether there is always enough to invest in, and access to credit is the limiting factor, or not. The Post-Keysnians would say relying on monetary policy alone is stupid, because (to distill in a parable) if no one can buy your stuff, it doesn't matter how cheap the factor is it's not worth it. That's when directly employing people (jobs guarantee) or handing out helicopter money can make a difference --- it's "root" demand, not some spooky shit effecting supply.

Back to the calculus stuff, an interesting idea is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage. This is "inflation for stocks not flows". In short, we want money at rest to go bad, so rich people and instutions are forced to spend and we don't grind to a halt via the paradox of thrift. But we don't want people's wages to inflate away, because they certainly cannot bargain hard enough to get enough raise to keep up. Demurrage is wonderfully hamfisted in trying to do the former but not the latter --- money at rest becomes less money, money flows retain their purchasing power.

Re: Does QE Cause Wealth Inequality?

#126

When many people have few assets, and few people have many, and you cause the value of assets to go up, the nominal gap between two is larger, but the relative amounts are the same. This is basic math. Suppose we have two individuals who experience 25% growth due to QE: Person A: $1,000 * 25% growth = $1,250 Person B: $1,000,000 * 25% growth = $1,250,000 Originally, the wealth gap between A and B was 1000:1. It remai…

Until next month, when person A has $0 compounding at 25%, and person B has $1 249 000 compounding at 25% (a.k.a. cost of living).

Re: Does QE Cause Wealth Inequality?

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should I do a :D and /s? I obviously don't want more pandemics and bloody revolution --- I am sure I will be the one getting guillotined, for one. The best case --- if it works --- is "non-reformist reform" as the European social democracies were planning. Some Marxists think it was doomed to fail because you can't avoid the antagonisms. I think they were merely prudish about printing money (especially Germans), and…

Immigrants are much more of an underclass in Europe than they are in America.

Immigrants mainly just don't exist in Europe to the same degree. They are culturally more shat on there, but materially better off as they get more safety net, and aren't the backbone of the shitty service industry like here.

Letting in immigrants while you are trying to reduce working hours is a good idea because a) moral b) you are trying to show off you have the best society, let people vote with their feat c) you still need to make investments so being able to have total working hours go up while per-capita working hours goes down is good. Especially if there is a tech/productivity lag where you don't get fully automated dank shit for a few years after you make labor scarce

Letting in immigrants as beneath-the-table workers while trying to lower working hours means you get apartheid not utopia, so yeah, it's bad. The thing that makes America less bad is at least the elite likes to overwork itself for cultural reasons so the rat race is just as stupid but less unfair than it would otherwise be.

Re: Does QE Cause Wealth Inequality?

#129
post #18

How have people not caught onto this yet? When the Fed prints money, its a guaranteed bet that assets go up. The rich use their wealth and huge amounts of leverage via financial instruments to generate massive returns. This has been going on for a long time. Literally all you need to do is throw your whole bank account into call options. Working a 200k-300k a year job is almost a waste of time with how much money the…

Can you elaborate on how one can use call options to make a 200K/year job a 'waste of time'?

Borrow the maximum you can and invest it. There's very little interest to pay on loans right now and has been for about 13 years now. In the meantime assets have skyrocketed in value. Unless there's a change in policy and a crash is allowed it won't change. Put all the money into old fashion shares and housing. No need to risk it on options or anything like that.

Hindsight shows the stock market has more than doubled in 10years and interest has been at <3% for even small players in that time. Those who borrowed after the 2008 crash needn't work today. Now this is of course hindsight. But the conditions that allowed this to continue for 13 years are still ongoing which is a cause for alarm.

Re: Does QE Cause Wealth Inequality?

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call options are a bad move to participate in equity upside, unless you are working on single stocks. There's little upside convexity at the index level. This is doubly true for someone who doesn't know how options work. You can easily end up out of the money with your entire option punt and lose everything even though equities go up (just not enough for your bet). Furthermore, the last couple of years the underlying…

Probably you are correct. But that illustrates my point even more, I have made absurd amounts of cash by believing in the power of QE and the FED. Its not rocket science, its just accept that the fear mongering of "you are too dumb to use leverage" is false. But I will say, I have had huge returns on QQQ calls. Its working just fine for me to buy LEAPs 10-20% out of the money.

You can certainly make a lot of money on options, but the behavior may be non-obvious to someone who doesn't have experience with them. If you buy a 10% OOM call and the market stays flat, you end up losing the entire investment even though the underlying hasn't moved. Do you know how does that 10% relate to the current implied or realized volatilities, are you actually buying the optimal strikes or have just gotten lucky? If this was just a fraction of your portfolio, then it's no harm done, but if you repeatedly punt your entire portfolio into OOM options, you are running a serious tail risk of being completely wiped out even if the market goes up!

Options absolutely are rocket science. The actual pricing is anything but obvious and requires undergraduate level math. More advanced models require graduate level math and focused study. Yes, making money on stocks is easier than ever, but please for the love of God at least use something like levered ETFs or futures and don't bet the entire farm. The bubble is going to pop. Inflation is picking up, and the moment central banks step off the gas pedal (which they will have to), there's going to be a de-leveraging. Retail will almost always end up holding the bag one way or another.

You can generally get 2-3x leverage with futures or ETFs as well and they are a linear instrument with obvious payoff characteristics. Informed players absolutely know and track the amount of flows that these super leveraged retail traders are injecting. Make no mistake, you are being monitored and trades are being done in anticipation of the flows you'll generate. And once the bubble pops and you are forced to liquidate, you are going to be liquidating at a really bad price.

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