Engine of Inequality. Karen Petrou
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Название: Engine of Inequality

Автор: Karen Petrou

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Банковское дело

Серия:

isbn: 9781119730057

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ engine. This book will prove that financial policy is this inequality engine and also that it can first be reversed and then shut down. If we fail in the 2020s as badly as we failed in the 2010s to fix financial policy, fury will indeed be loosed and financial policy-makers will deserve it. The rest of us, not so much.

      1 1. Karen Shaw Petrou, “Income Inequality: The Battlefield Casualty of Post-Crisis Financial Policy” (speech, Chicago, November 3, 2020), available at https://fedfin.com/images/stories/press_center/speeches/Income%20Inequality-The%20Battlefield%20Casualty%20of%20Post-Crisis%20Financial%20Policy_Speech.pdf.

      2 2. Karen Shaw Petrou, “The Inexorable Will of the Financial Market: Profit Imperatives and Financial-Policy Design” (speech, New York, March 1, 2018), available at https://fedfin.com/images/stories/press_center/speeches/Karen%20Petrou%20Remarks%20Prepared%20for%20Distinguished%20Speaker%20Lecture%20Federal%20Reserve%20Bank%20of%20New%20York.pdf.

      3 3. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).

      4 4. Irving Kristol, “'When virtue loses all her loveliness' – some reflections on capitalism and ‘the free society,’” Public Interest 8 (Fall 1970), available at https://www.nationalaffairs.com/storage/app/uploads/public/58e/1a4/afc/58e1a4afc4eee090463739.pdf.

      Nobody had our backs in office, not Democrats or Republicans. I'm tired of being sugarcoated and being robbed in the process.… [Politicians] are so out of touch with reality and real people. All of them.

      – An autoworker who voted twice for Barack Obama and then for Donald Trump*

      It's no coincidence that 2010 also marks the start of massive changes to US financial policy due to the monetary and regulatory response to the 2008 financial crisis. The powerful link between financial policy and our far more unequal economy is the topic of this book; breaking it is its goal.

      What the Fed called a robust recovery was in fact the slowest since the Second World War and the most inequitably shared one ever, as this book will prove. The economy was also very fragile because gains were in large part derived from high-flying financial markets with no staying power beyond the wind the Fed put beneath their wings. Ultra-low interest rates not only failed to stimulate growth, but also made most Americans even worse off because trillions of dollars in savings were sacrificed in favor of ever higher stock markets. Even families with a bit put aside and those with a strong case to start a small business couldn't get loans at reasonable rates on safe-and-sound terms. In short, the economic-equality divide got bigger – a lot bigger – due to all of these financial policies. Capitalism is working fine, but only for capitalists.