This does not imply causality as the author mistakenly assumes. Maybe the bottom 90% have more debt simply because costs are rising faster than wages and ability to save. Maybe the rich can save more because thy earn more.
This does not imply causality as the author mistakenly assumes. Maybe the bottom 90% have more debt simply because costs are rising faster than wages and ability to save. Maybe the rich can save more because thy earn more.
That's certainly a big part of it, but far from the only one.
When you're living paycheck to paycheck you have no money to invest, so the poor are usually limited to earning only as much as their poorly paying jobs will pay them, while the salaries of the rich usually only make up a small to non-existent portion of their wealth.
On top of that, at least in the US, capital gains are taxed at a much lower rate than income, so those whose income makes up a large fraction of what they earn are doubly screwed.
For the really poor, food expenses are a significant portion of their expenses, and yet many of them live in food deserts where food is not only less nutritious and less varied than what the rich have access to, but that food is often more expensive.
If as a poor person you have to take out a payday loan to get by, you're also going to be paying through the nose for that.
Predatory lending practices are also widely employed against the poor.
If you can't afford your own home (or to own a home but never pay it off), you could wind up paying way more in rent or mortgage payments than if you had bought a home outright in cash and never had to pay any interest on it at all.
That's not to mention medical expenses, which often bankrupt people in America... or legal expenses, which the poor often can't afford and wind up going to jail because of.
Finally, its the wealthy and powerful who write the laws and and use their connections in and various forms of bribes of government to favor mostly themselves, their friends and families. The poor do not have this sort of pull, and are often led by the nose by the rich to vote against their own interests.
You can't choose one sentence and refute the whole article based on it. It's a part of a whole. The point of the article is to make that causal link.
I could argue that liberalization of global capital flows allowed significant foreign investment leading to an abnormally low interest rate regime, which is why everyone (rich and poor) has taken on more debt, and I guarantee you that the rich take on far more debt than the poor. But as the poor tend to have mostly human capital on their balance sheet while the rich have assets, it creates an appearance that the poor have net debt (which they do not) while the rich have net assets (which they do). In fact both the poor and rich are solvent -- have more assets than debt, but the assets of the poor are future wage earnings. Thus in any reduction of interest rates, the poor will disproportionately benefit over the rich and will take advantage of this to increase borrowing.
E.g. if you are rich then both your assets and your liabilities will grow in lockstep (at the macro level). But if you are poor, then your assets are your wages which do not grow in lockstep with interest rates. Thus a reduction of interest rates disproportionately helps the poor to borrow more but an increase disproportionately hurts their ability to borrow. These are just some of the interesting effects when you seriously look at debt-dynamics and interest regimes. But in no regime can you make a case that the mere existence of the rich somehow causes the poor to borrow.
Yet the reason for low interest rates and the fact that such low rates are responsible for both the behavior of the rich and poor are not covered in this piece. In fact it used to be the case that Rebecca's predecessors would bemoan the fact of how the poor were locked out of credit markets and thus unable to participate in the wealth-creating business of taking on debt to purchase long-lived assets, and thus they had to rent an apartment instead of being able to buy a house, or could not borrow to get a more reliable car on credit, etc. Now that those barriers have been substantially reduced, there is lots of hand-wringing about how the poor are taking on debt. This amnesia is funny to those of us who have been following this debate from times when rates were much higher and the poor borrowed very little. Then the complaint was "why are the rich locking the poor out of credit markets?" Resentment can be stoked in any situation. It is particularly hilarious because Keynes advocated for lowering interest rates in order to "euthanize the rentier" and he blamed the rentier class for keeping rates higher than they should have been. E.g. he blamed the rich for high interest rates. Now the argument is that rich are to blame for low interest rates. Keynes would be rolling over in his grave. But the persistent theme seems to be that the rich are to be blamed.
In fact there is nothing wrong with taking on debt. What matters is your ability to service the debt, and in a low interest rate regime, that service capacity is substantially increased, and thus so are debt levels. Perhaps this is not worth the trade off of increased financial fragility. Or perhaps it is -- data must be required and real arguments made. But merely the existence of the debt levels themselves -- again held both by poor and rich -- are not something to be avoided.
This blog post doesn't attempt to engage with any of this literature or provide any fact-based arguments about casual mechanisms or whether something is beneficial or harmful. It's just more hand-wringing, which is a shame as debt-dynamics, interest rate regimes, global investment flows and credit constraints are important topics that deserve to be treated seriously rather than as a political football in the resentment olympics.
If it's easier to borrow money, costs will go up. Look at college education over the past half century, or housing vs interest rates.
So if some people start taking on more debt than they should because it's easier, a lot of other people are pushed into it even if they wouldn't have originally when they're priced out by the borrowers.
Also, the article seem to treats building a new road as an unalloyed good.
It's worth having a discussion about whether this makes sense and is something to strive for.
Unfortunately, because society has been based on this for so long, the people who spent their lives paying off a 30 year mortgage would never agree to make any changes that would reduce the value of their house. You'd need to come up with a plan to transition away from a house-based model of wealth over a long enough period of time where current home owners don't get screwed but people know what it means to buy a house now.
And I don't think any plan that's long-term enough to be sensible could actually survive politics long enough to be successfully implemented.
Which is what happened before 2008, when there was very little oversight in borrowing (e.g. NINJA loans). We know empirically that if the lenders are not obligated to make sure that the loans can be repayed, predatory lending will occur and cause social problems.
Some of these assets have a poorer counterparty who is getting access to that money in return for repayment + interest. Perversely, the more money is available in these assets, the lower the interest rate and so the more money these counterparties can borrow. This drives up the cost of physical assets being bought with this money, like homes, because the value of the home is dictated by the debt load a buyer can bear. Lower interest rates means you can support more debt, which means someone will take on more debt and outcompete you for that house.
The middle class uses this money to buy cars/houses which helps the 1% to increasing their savings, which they then invest a portion of into banks...
BUT like another comment discussed, a lot of this is going over seas. Right now this cycle is pushing US asset values higher, but at some point this will come crashing down, and the money that was invested in under inflated markets will be valued correctly/over valued.
At which point that money will flow back into the US.
Since there is a lot of cheap credit price stops constraining the demand side. You can get almost arbitrary large loan with arbitrary long timespan. This causes prices to rise. Houses seem like good investment so wealthy buy them restricting supply side, causing prices to rise even higher.
Rising prices make it impossible for most to save for the house. They have to take loans.
Now poor people who want house need to pay the inflated price + credit fees on top of that. Sellers see their assets rise in value, creditors see more customers and more revenue.
If there was no cheap credit then the prices wouldn't rise so much because nobody would be buying them.
Now, I don't know how true is all above but that seems to be the explanation of the issue I've seen many times.
You just rephrased the article. What you are saying is identical to what the article said.
If companies don't borrow money from the wealthy and don't spend their money on hiring people or higher wages then then there are unemployed people who must (emphasis on must) consume (think of food and rent) in excess of their income because their income is 0 and the only way they can keep consuming is by going into debt. Therefore what you and the article said is the same thing.