Understanding Failed Policies: Wealth Effect, Wage Effect, Poverty Effect

“Central banks’ attempts to boost borrowing, consumption and wages by inflating asset bubbles leads to the poverty effect, not the wealth effect.

Central bankers have been counting on “the wealth effect” to lift their economies out of the post-2009 global meltdown slump. The wealth effect concept is simple: flooding the economy with credit and zero-interest money boosts the value of assets such as housing, stocks and bonds. Those owning the assets feel wealthier, and thus more inclined to borrow and spend more money. This new spending creates more demand which then leads employers to hire more employees.

Unfortunately for the bottom 90% who don’t own enough stocks to feel any wealth effect, the central bankers got it wrong: wages don’t rise as a result of the wealth effect, they rise from an increased production of goods and services. Despite unprecedented money-printing, zero interest rates and vast credit expansion, real wages have declined.

Apologists will claim that it would even be worse without central banks attempting to inflate asset bubbles in search of the wealth effect, but the wage/M2 money supply correlation suggest chasing the wealth effect has been a policy failure.

The unintended consequence of inflating asset bubbles to drive an illusory wealth effect is that speculative bubbles inevitably pop, creating a pervasive poverty effect. The asset bubble creates phantom collateral that households borrow against. When the bubble pops, they’re left with the debt and debt payments (“the poverty effect”) while the ephemeral “wealth” has vanished….”

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