{"id":39031,"date":"2018-10-12T07:36:22","date_gmt":"2018-10-12T12:36:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=39031"},"modified":"2018-10-12T07:36:22","modified_gmt":"2018-10-12T12:36:22","slug":"the-feds-easy-money-policies-arent-helping-income-growth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=39031","title":{"rendered":"The Fed&#8217;s Easy-Money Policies Aren&#8217;t Helping Income Growth"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"page-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mises.org\/wire\/feds-easy-money-policies-arent-helping-income-growth\">The Fed&#8217;s Easy-Money Policies Aren&#8217;t Helping Income Growth<\/a><\/h3>\n<h2 class=\"page-title\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"color: #333333; font-size: 16px;\" draggable=\"false\" src=\"https:\/\/mises.org\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/slideshow\/public\/static-page\/img\/inequality1.PNG?itok=wc0PquKl\" alt=\"inequality1.PNG\" \/><\/h2>\n<div id=\"slideshow\" class=\"group-image-wrapper field-group-html-element pull-left\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"body-content clearfix\">\n<p>Back in August, <a href=\"http:\/\/http\/\/webcache.googleusercontent.com\/search?q=cache:lNpv4JOB7AQJ:https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/view\/articles\/2018-08-06\/inequality-why-bank-rules-and-fed-rates-hurt-middle-class&amp;amp;num=1&amp;amp;client=firefox-b-1-ab&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;gl=us&amp;amp;strip=1&amp;amp;vwsrc=0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Bloomberg<\/em> interviewed Karen Petrou<\/a> about her research on quantitative easing and the Fed&#8217;s policies since the 2008 financial crisis. What she has discovered has not been encouraging for people who aren&#8217;t already high-income, and in recent research presented to the New York Fed, she concluded &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/economicequality.blog\/2018\/07\/26\/its-worse-than-you-thought\/#more-344\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Post-crisis monetary and regulatory policy had an unintended but nonetheless dramatic impact on the income and wealth divides<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This assessment is based on her own work, but also on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.minneapolisfed.org\/institute\/working-papers-institute\/iwp9.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">a 2018 report released by the Minneapolis Fed<\/a>.<a id=\"footnoteref1_al0yb20\" class=\"see-footnote\" title=\"&quot;Income and Wealth Inequality in America, 1949-2016&quot; by Moritz Kuhn. Institute Working Paper 9, June 2018.\" href=\"https:\/\/mises.org\/wire\/feds-easy-money-policies-arent-helping-income-growth#footnote1_al0yb20\">1<\/a>\u00a0 The report showed that both income and wealth growth in the US have been much better for higher-income households in recent decades<\/p>\n<p>Notably, when indexed to 1971 (the year Nixon ended the last link between gold and the dollar) we can see the disparity between the top wealth groups and other groups:<\/p>\n<div class=\"media media-element-container media-image_no_caption\"><a class=\"colorbox init-colorbox-processed cboxElement\" title=\"income_wealth.PNG\" href=\"https:\/\/mises.org\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/max_1160\/public\/income_wealth.PNG?itok=vLRuuXGk\" data-colorbox-gallery=\"gallery-file-77982-A4aRC_jjFDI\" data-cbox-img-attrs=\"{&quot;title&quot;: &quot;&quot;, &quot;alt&quot;: &quot;&quot;}\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/mises.org\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/max_full\/public\/income_wealth.PNG?itok=P3mFnXGM\" alt=\"income_wealth.PNG\" width=\"638\" height=\"269\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/3.bp.blogspot.com\/-b9haXTtPdpo\/W7zXXyQ-GyI\/AAAAAAAALtI\/jFAD54hpIUUumfBbzqb_pKqWZkm33VAVgCLcBGAs\/s1600\/income_wealth.PNG\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u00a0<\/a>Petrou <a href=\"https:\/\/economicequality.blog\/2018\/07\/26\/its-worse-than-you-thought\/#more-344\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">continues<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>What did we learn [from the Minneapolis Fed report]? This new dataset shows clearly that U.S. wealth inequality is the worst it has been throughout the entire U.S. post-war period. We also know now that the U.S. middle class is even more <a href=\"https:\/\/economicequality.blog\/2017\/12\/20\/the-morass-that-swallowed-the-middle-class\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u201chollowed out\u201d <\/a>than we thought in terms of income, with any gains made by the lower-middle class sharply reversed after 2007.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Indeed, the report concludes: &#8220;&#8230;half of all American households have less wealth today in real terms than the median household had in 1970.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>A closer look at income data also suggests that income growth has been especially anemic since 2007. Using data from the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.census.gov\/content\/dam\/Census\/library\/publications\/2018\/demo\/p60-263.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Census Bureau&#8217;s 2017 report on income and poverty<\/a>, we find that incomes for the 90th percentile are increasingly pulling away from both the median (50th percentile) income and from the 20th-percentile income.<a id=\"footnoteref2_muqr37l\" class=\"see-footnote\" title=\"&quot;Income and Poverty in the United States&quot;: 2017, Current Population Reports. Released September 2018.\u00a0\" href=\"https:\/\/mises.org\/wire\/feds-easy-money-policies-arent-helping-income-growth#footnote2_muqr37l\">2<\/a><\/p>\n<div class=\"media media-element-container media-image_no_caption\"><a class=\"colorbox init-colorbox-processed cboxElement\" title=\"income_percentile.PNG\" href=\"https:\/\/mises.org\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/max_1160\/public\/income_percentile.PNG?itok=JH7febg5\" data-colorbox-gallery=\"gallery-file-77983-A4aRC_jjFDI\" data-cbox-img-attrs=\"{&quot;title&quot;: &quot;&quot;, &quot;alt&quot;: &quot;&quot;}\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/mises.org\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/max_full\/public\/income_percentile.PNG?itok=J3ZMgD5o\" alt=\"income_percentile.PNG\" width=\"693\" height=\"418\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/-3L5qwKLT7Vs\/W7zeCi6RNAI\/AAAAAAAALtU\/kHtI0Zrs6Y4F_feog7B4B216iHEyGPr7QCLcBGAs\/s1600\/income_percentile.PNG\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u00a0<\/a>The household income for the 20th percentile increased 70 percent since 1971, while it has only increased 20 percent at the 20th percentile.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Fed&#8217;s Easy-Money Policies Aren&#8217;t Helping Income Growth Back in August, Bloomberg interviewed Karen Petrou about her research on quantitative easing and the Fed&#8217;s policies since the 2008 financial crisis. What she has discovered has not been encouraging for people who aren&#8217;t already high-income, and in recent research presented to the New York Fed, she [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2490,83,9172,4896,303,1183,15116,431,22257,7617,534,4219,14776,3650],"class_list":["post-39031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-2008-financial-crisis","tag-bloomberg","tag-bretton-woods-agreement","tag-easy-money","tag-fed","tag-gold-standard","tag-income-growth","tag-interest-rates","tag-karen-petrou","tag-mises-institute","tag-monetary-policy","tag-richard-nixon","tag-ryan-mcmaken","tag-us-federal-reserve"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39031"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39032,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39031\/revisions\/39032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}