by Steve Roth Originally Posted at Wealth Economics (June 2023) Recent headline inflation prints are below the Fed’s target, and falling. That news is a powerful tool for controlling expectations, but the Fed’s not using it. 1.5%. That’s the latest headline inflation rate in the U.S. per the May CPI release, and also according to […]

Who gets the money? Follow the assets. by Steve Roth Originally Published at Wealth Economics This post by Judd Legum at Popular Information (read and subscribe!) prompts me to revisit the issue of share buybacks. This passage in particular: It seems eye-popping. But is it? Even (especially?) finance and econ types don’t really understand buybacks from a […]

Progressives and social democrats should be fighting them tooth and nail, not blithely embracing them. by Steve Roth Originally Posted at Wealth Economics The spreadsheet behind the tables and graphs here is available on request. Drop me a line in the comments or elsewhere. Following the community of Socks (🧦s) or “social democrats” out there […]

Short answer: Lending, government deficits, capital formation, and holding gains by Steve Roth Originally Published at Wealth Economics I ended my last post with an apparent conundrum: “One person’s spending is another person’s income.” It seems to imply that spending and income must be equal. And since saving equals income minus spending, saving must be…zero? That’s obviously […]

It’s all about the words . . . by Steve Roth Originally Published at Wealth Economics This article was first published on Cameron Murray’s great Fresh Economic Thinking. It’s slightly revised here. Maybe I’m just dense, but when I started studying economics roughly twenty years ago, I immediately ran into a bunch of basic concepts that […]

by Steve Roth Originally Published at Wealth Economics Wealth concentration got just a tiny bit less extreme. The bottom 50% of American wealth holders got richer in the last three years: in 2021, ’22, and ’23 — not just in absolute dollar terms, but relative to richer folks. The percentage growth was faster than it […]

by Steve Roth Wealth Economics This post is prompted by Matthew Klein’s (very wonky) post about recent changes in QE/QT, and the Fed’s balance sheet. It prompted me to do a quick calculation that I’ve been meaning to get to: when household wealth increases (due to stock-market price runups or really anything else), what effect does that have […]

by Steve Roth Wealth Economics This picture from the Center for American Progress, and variations, have been making the rounds on the interwebs lately, eg here, here, and here. The headline is that younger households got 49% richer during/since Covid, in inflation-adjusted “real” terms. But some drill-down is in order here. What actually happened? Start with background. Here are the nominal […]

by Steve Roth Wealth Economics Imagine a five-player poker game. Assume all the players have equal skill, so the flows across the table over the course of the game are just a random walk. “It’s just how the cards fall.” All the players start with the same number of chips. But there’s one difference: four […]

by Steve Roth Wealth Economics Matthew Klein and Joey Politano have been singularly responsible in their discussions of “excess saving” in the covid era — not least by always putting that term in “so-called” quotes. It’s saving in excess of what would have happened if pre-covid linear trends had continued (with the trend based on some chosen range of preceding quarters or years). […]