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foobar2021 | 4 years ago

The affluent are invested in companies. Maybe I’m wrong but I’m going to guess American companies have multiple orders of magnitude more debt then the bottom 50% you’re referring to; just not nearly as much relevant to their greater assets. Some percentage of each company value is linked to their ability to take cheap debt, use that for further investments/acquisitions, and have inflation mitigate the damage (directly) or risk (indirectly via bailouts).

None of the above conflicts with your point about wealth but they seem like completely different metrics that aren’t inherently related.

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human|4 years ago

What is important is how much debt you have that cost you less than inflation. Governments and wealthy individuals have tons of 2% interest (or less) debt. Inflation at 4% erodes that debt pretty fast. The poor and middleclass have debt at 10-30% and inflation at 4% is doing not much to erode it.

RC_ITR|4 years ago

That's not true. Regardless of the interest rate, all loans' principle is inflated at the same rate. You can argue that the poor are more likely to have their principle grow due to underpayment, but that's a separate point.