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Comment by the_gastropod | Hacker News Reader

> This is fairly simple maths, the rich are enslaving the working class with debt through inflation.

I often wonder where this baloney comes from. The notion does seem pretty tightly coupled to the rise of Bitcoin hubbub, which spawned a small army of armchair economists. Inflation primarily benefits the non-rich in two main ways:

1. It inflates away savings, which the rich definitionally have more of than the poor.

2. It inflates away debts, which the poor definitionally have more of than the rich.

Inflation is one of a small set of tools that protects an economy from rampant inequality. Another tool is progressive taxation, which has its own astroturfed opposition in "taxation is theft" and "flat tax" enthusiasts who aggressively call for the removal of things that directly protect them.

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> 2. It inflates away debts, which the poor definitionally have more of than the rich.

No, they don't. Generally, the more wealthy you are, the more debt you have.

The reason why this is should be easy to understand: Rich people have a lot of assets that can be used to secure loans, and are generally safer investements to the lenders, so they pay less interest, and can take on more debt to use as leverage for investment.

Anything that reduces debt helps the wealthiest segments of population way more than they help the poorer ones, and monetary policy where rates are held below inflation is a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.

Sorry, I should have clarified net debts. The size of your gross debt is irrelevant because the asset side is also being inflated away. Net is all that matters.

(Yes, there are asset classes that're historically good at being protected against inflation. But they typically represent a small part of a portfolio)

There is no conspiracy here. The implication that the Fed works to enrich the richest is a really dangerous and ignorant thing to perpetuate. The Fed is one of the very few things that offers some protection from unrelenting wealth inequality. It's hardly perfect, or immune from criticism. But attacking inflation itself as some conspiracy to enrich the already-wealthy is absolutely ludicrous.

> (Yes, there are asset classes that're historically good at being protected against inflation. But they typically represent a small part of a portfolio)

Isn't it the other way round? If you invest in shares, real estate or even gold, you don't need to care about inflation? Only fixed income like bonds is bothered by inflation.

(By moderate amounts of inflation. If the country you invest in descends into eg hyperinflation, the whole economy is going down, so shares won't hold up to well either.)

> asset side is also being inflated away

The amount of money those assets are worth becomes inflated, and increased not lowered.

I take issue with #1. The rich have very large percentages of their wealth in vehicles that don't get inflated away. Stocks. Interest-bearing debt. Etc. I would argue that Somewhere in the middle class is probably the peak for "% of total net worth in fiat currency". People who have enough money to save, but not enough money that their emergency fund is a trivial % of their net worth. And even then, they probably don't have a ton of money in instruments that yield much more than inflation. It's a lot safer for a CEO to keep 80% of their net worth in stocks because they could live off 1-5% of their net worth for a lifetime (even if they need to scale back their lifestyle a bit - they won't be homeless).

> It inflates away savings, which the rich definitionally have more of than the poor.

The rich do not have savings they have assets that generate income thats not taxed the poor have savings like pensions as they need money to support them if they are unable to work.

> It inflates away debts, which the poor definitionally have more of than the rich.

This is baseless inflation increases debt as the value of the debt has not increased but the amount of money you have to pay back does, because of inflation.

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