Inflation hurts people with savings and helps people with debt.

Noah Smith explains how (and why) inflation is a good thing if you are in debt, and a bad thing if you have a bunch-a savings.  Its wonderfully written (go read it), but I'll give you the money quotes
Who has more savings than debt? Old people and rich people. Who has more debt than savings? Young workers who are paying off mortgages. In other words, the video has it exactly backwards - inflation will not take your house away from you, inflation will prevent your house from being taken away from you. It will save your American Dream. If you don't believe me, go back and look at my example again. It works.
Just remember: Inflation hurts people with savings and helps people with debt. An awful lot of Americans these days fall into that second category. Before you go embracing the hard-money, Austrian, gold-standard stuff, think about which category includes you! 

The bottom line though is what I started off with - if you have a lot of savings, inflation is bad. Really bad.
The problem is that "have a lot of savings" basically is not-code for "rich people".  Which basically consists of most of the financial sector, big business, and Congress (yeah, Congress is rich.  Did you really need to ask?)
And that would, seriously, explain this absolutely paranoid anti-inflationary fetish that we have in this county.
Inflation stole money from you by shrinking your bank account, but it put money in your pocket by shrinking your mortgage debt!! Notice that the way I have the numbers here, your net worth went up, because your mortgage debt was bigger than your bank account. 

So if your net worth goes up and the purchasing power of your income stays the same, as in this simple example, inflation makes you richer. Inflation hurts people who have more savings than debt, and helps people who have more debt than savings.

Sigh...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Erlang, Binaries, and Garbage Collection (Sigh)

Cannonball Tree!

Visualizing Prime Numbers