Only if you a) keep your money in cash under your mattress and b) aren't also benefiting from having your debts reduced by inflation.
It's very simplistic to say that (low, predictable) inflation hurts individuals.
Only if you a) keep your money in cash under your mattress and b) aren't also benefiting from having your debts reduced by inflation.
It's very simplistic to say that (low, predictable) inflation hurts individuals.
This affects poorest members of society disproportionately because they don’t have spare capital to allocate in order to offset their loss from inflation. They just pay higher prices.
Those without without debt are also losing, less than those with debt, but still losing.
Only people winning are the people with enough spare capital to 'participate'
Because the $10 mil in stocks also appreciated by the roughly 7% average annual S&P 500 returns, meaning the rich person's wealth still increased 5% after 2% inflation.
The $10,000 in a current account earned 0.5%, making the poor person 1.5% poorer after inflation.
It's a textbook case of 'the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer'.
The poor do not have the flexibility to allocate their capital to higher yield assets that allow them to 'escape' inflation.
I am not advocating a fringe position. In fact, the first three papers I found investigating this issue came to the same conclusion: inflation actually increases poverty:
[1] "Inflation and the Poor" https://www.jstor.org/stable/2673879?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...
[2] "Poverty, inflation and economic growth: empirical evidence from Pakistan" https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/34290/1/MPRA_paper_34290.pdf
[3] "Has Inflation Hurt the Poor? Regional Analysis in the Philippines" https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/28370/wp...
Hurting might be the wrong term. Analogy would be something like having some bonus card which gives you 2% off for every purchase. Some people obsess about having that kind of card, but most people wouldn't care, because it is only 2%. Obviously the 2% difference isn't "hurting" most people, more like very small tax.
Btw there are cashback credit cards which give back something like 0,5% to 1%, I wonder how popular those are...