Earlier quoted context omitted.
> However, I strongly suspect poor folks and especially middle class folks, have far more debt as a percentage of net worth than rich folks do and so spend more time at the spigot so to speak - relatively, not in absolute terms. It reads as if you put some kind of blame on those poorer people who borrow money .. or do I get this wrong? You do realize that taking on debt doesn't make these poorer people the ones who c…
Not trying to blame anyone for anything here! My point was that in isolation, if wages keep pace with inflation, inflation benefits debtors (especially long term structured debt like mortgages) because you take out the debt in today dollars and can repay them with future dollars worth less. For instance I have a 2.75-ish% APR 30 year fixed rate mortgage but inflation was 7%, so I made a ton of money by having that de…
Agree. This is one effect of inflation that's beneficial for debtors.
There's another effect that lets especially lower wealth/income groups look not so good: the structure of net worth. Wealthy and high income group people typically have assets that will be more or less inflation neutral. I don't need to make a list: real estate, stocks, ... the big fortunes consisting of these won't care one bit about inflation. Low income people mostly don't have these. If they own anything at all, it's mostyl cash, so hit 100 % by inflation.
> But this is all conditional on wages keeping pace.
Here's the catch ... according to [1]:
> Research by the McKinsey Global Institute found that between 65% and 70% of people in 25 advanced countries saw no increase in their earnings between 2005 and 2014.
You might say, hey, we didn't have much inflation according to CPI from 2005 to 2014. Well, then just take housing prices, which make up a big chunk of most peoples' expenses and have increased significantly over this period according to OECD data [2].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jul/14/up-to-70-pe... [2] https://data.oecd.org/chart/6yZt