Who Are The Rentiers? Paul Krugman

[Derechos]

Following up on my rentier post and the eurocentric followup, a question: who are we talking about? That is, who stands to gain from deflation, and lose if inflation is, say, 4 percent over a period of 10 years?

snip

Financial securities are overwhelmingly held by the rich — more than 60 percent by just one percent of the population, more than 98 percent by the top 10 percent. It’s true that middle-class Americans own significant shares of deposits, and that some part of their pension accounts would be in bonds. On the other hand, middle-class Americans owe the lion’s share of debt; relatively speaking, the wealthy have hardly any.

So if you think about the distributional consequences of the choice between a Japan-style lost decade of very low or negative inflation and a Mankiw-Rogoff strategy of higher inflation for a while, it’s very much about benefits to the wealthy versus benefits to the middle class. Since I’ve been arguing that some inflation would help the economy recover, what we’re seeing in practice is that defending the interests of a small wealthy slice of the population takes priority over a possible recovery strategy.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/who-are-the-rentiers/

[applegrove]

1. Yup. Something stinks a great deal about this non-recovery.