While most of the article is good, It's really sad that she apes the old refrain that inflation hurts the poor because they are in debt.
Many of the poor cannot even be in debt because they have no access to the financial system. Those that do, mostly have access to payday lending. It's laughable to hold the opinion that inflation will do anything for someone who owes 10% on top by next month. For the middle class, it's one step up -- credit cards, still laughable to think that a 2% inflation will help out someone with a 15% APR revolving line of credit.
The place where it starts to help is when you have large capital loans on fixed interest like home ownership. But her graphs in the next section relating inflation to wealth gap capture the 1% vs the rest, which is not necessarily a mechanistically informative figure of merit... I'd like to see it where the wealth gap when you draw the line closer to something like the low-interest loan accessibility gap.
I think you are misunderstanding her argument and tbh I don't think anyone makes the claim that inflation hurts the poor because they are in debt. If anything it is the exact opposite. Inflation is a benefit to debtors because they get to pay back principal in devalued currency. That's why a cheap 30 year mortgage is an amazing deal in an inflationary environment
Inflation hurts people who don't have access to debt and who are more dependent on cash and on fixed incomes. This is exactly what Lyn claims here:
> There are, however, some groups in lower income brackets that do poorly in inflationary environments. If someone doesn’t have a lot of money and lives on a fixed income in retirement, they have a lot of vulnerability to inflation. Those sorts of folks should consider owning inflation hedges to protect their lifestyle, if they expect that high levels of inflation have a reasonable probability of occurring.
Holy mistype. In GP post I meant to type "good for the poor because they are in debt", which is what Lyn uncritically forwards in OP as a (to be fair common) argument.
"lower classes also have more debt which gets partially inflated away in inflationary environments, and..."
Also the wealthy benefit greatly from debt-based financial instruments (corporate bonds for the companies they run, leveraged trading, forex, options) even if they aren't in debt personally.
Many of the poor cannot even be in debt because they have no access to the financial system. Those that do, mostly have access to payday lending. It's laughable to hold the opinion that inflation will do anything for someone who owes 10% on top by next month. For the middle class, it's one step up -- credit cards, still laughable to think that a 2% inflation will help out someone with a 15% APR revolving line of credit.
The place where it starts to help is when you have large capital loans on fixed interest like home ownership. But her graphs in the next section relating inflation to wealth gap capture the 1% vs the rest, which is not necessarily a mechanistically informative figure of merit... I'd like to see it where the wealth gap when you draw the line closer to something like the low-interest loan accessibility gap.