The Philly Fed insists that “redistributing wealth” to the wealthy isn’t the main idea, but just a potential side effect of stimulus that they can’t do much about.
“Monetary policy currently implemented by the Federal Reserve and other major central banks is not intended to benefit one segment of the population at the expense of another by redistributing income and wealth,” …
“However, it is probably impossible to avoid the redistributive consequences of monetary policy”.
We’re shocked. Shocked, we tell you. It turns out that handing out free money, buying worthless assets at face value and allowing a small cabal of private banks the sole right to access your magic free-money window, “may” have given some financial advantages to “one segment of the population”. But that’s just a side effect of saving the “economy”.
Of course, it’s not just the bankers. The 1% also happen to hold vastly more financial assets than the lower 99% — so they may directly benefit from financial asset-inflating monetary policy.
