2022.06.18 资产经济的终结

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The End of the Asset Economy
Rising interest rates are ending an era in which the rich got much, much richer.

By Annie Lowrey
A top hat spewing three downward trending arrows.
Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Shutterstock
JUNE 18, 2022, 6:30 AM ET
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About the author: Annie Lowrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Here’s a bit of esoterica I think about from time to time: Mark Zuckerberg has a mortgage.

Or at least, he had one. A decade ago, the Facebook founder refinanced his loan on a $6 million Palo Alto mansion. He was worth $16 billion at the time, meaning he could have bought that house and a hundred more outright, no mortgage necessary. But First Republic Bank offered him an adjustable-rate loan with an initial interest rate of just 1.05 percent—below the rate of inflation, meaning the financier was paying him for the privilege of lending him money. Zuckerberg got to preserve his Facebook holdings, load up with tax-advantaged debt, and benefit from rising Silicon Valley real-estate prices. Why not take the loan?


“Why not take the loan?” has been a pretty good summary of American wealth building and class dynamics in the past few decades. An extended period of low interest rates has translated into surging asset values. That has made the small share of Americans capable of investing in homes, farmland, stocks, bonds, commodities, art, patents, water rights, start-ups, private equity, hedge funds, and other assets breathtakingly rich, fostering astonishing levels of wealth inequality. Given low labor-force participation and sluggish wage growth, the United States has come to look like what the theorists Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper, and Martijn Konings have termed an “asset economy”—in which prosperity is determined not by what you earn but by what you own.

The “why not take the loan” days are at least on hold. The Federal Reserve is hiking interest rates as it struggles to tamp down on inflation. That has pushed equities into a bear market (because corporate profits are at risk and investors are pulling back to safe assets), the housing market into a correction (because mortgages have become much more expensive), and the tech sector into free fall (as many companies are being asked to deliver profits, for once). Financing for mergers, acquisitions, and start-ups has dried up. And the economy might be on the verge of its second recession in two years, particularly if gas prices remain high. Animal spirits and a few hundred additional basis points have erased colossal sums of paper wealth in the past half year: $2 trillion and counting in crypto, $7 trillion and counting in stocks, uncalculated sums of home equity.

Shane Phillips: Renting is terrible. Owning is worse.

Rising interest rates and spiraling inflation might be killing off our age of asset capitalism, with no more 1.05 percent loans available for anyone, not even the richest of the rich. Does this mean a new economic equilibrium going forward, one less advantageous to capital and more advantageous to labor, less favorable for high-wealth rentiers and more favorable to regular-old renters? The uncomfortable answer is no. Low interest rates helped bolster growth and employment, even if they fostered inequality. But high interest rates are not going to build a more equitable economy either.

In some ways, this financial moment resembles the one that kicked off our grand, unequal age to begin with. In the ’70s, the United States economy was characterized by high rates of inflation, strong wage growth, and falling asset prices. (Fun fact: The S&P 500 gained essentially no value during the ’70s.) Inflation ate away at the earnings of working families, while stagnant asset prices squeezed high-income households.

Then, work started to pay less and ownership to pay more. The forces cleaving labor and capital were many and complicated. The share of employees in blue-collar professions declined, as did the unionization rate, as manufacturing became automated and shifted offshore. Corporations ballooned in size, and their tax bills fell, with big players’ dominance of their respective markets becoming more absolute and the financial economy going global. The minimum wage started falling in real terms, and the government deregulated the transportation, telecommunications, and financial sectors. All of these factors suppressed wage growth while jacking up corporate profits and increasing investment returns.

Over time, wealth inequality became more pernicious to society than income inequality. The problem is not just that a chief executive at a big company makes 33 times what a surgeon makes, and a surgeon makes nine times what an elementary-school teacher makes, and an elementary-school teacher makes twice what a person working the checkout at a dollar store makes—though that is a problem. It is that the chief executive also owns all of the apartments the cashiers live in, and their suppressed wages and hefty student-loan payments mean they can barely afford to make rent. “The key element shaping inequality is no longer the employment relationship, but rather whether one is able to buy assets that appreciate at a faster rate than both inflation and wages,” Adkins, Cooper, and Konings argue in their excellent treatise, The Asset Economy. “The millennial generation is the first to experience this reality in its full force.”

This reality took on its full force amid the monetary surfeit and fiscal austerity of the Obama years. Borrowing costs had been falling since the early ’80s. When the global financial crisis hit, the Fed dropped interest rates all the way to zero and started buying up trillions of dollars of safe financial assets, spurring investors to invest. Officials at the central bank begged—in their own way—members of Congress to spend more money to help the Fed get the country out of its slump. Instead, after a skimpy initial round of stimulus during Barack Obama’s first term, politicians started shrinking the deficit.

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This kind of giving-with-one-hand, taking-with-the-other policy mix helped lower the unemployment rate, though not as much as it would have if the country had deployed more stimulus. It also flushed ungodly sums of money into financial markets and corporate ledgers. With money essentially free to borrow, rich people loaded up on pieds-à-terre and index funds. Businesses bought up their rivals and soaked up their own shares. Working families hobbled along. The Fed helped the country avoid a double-dip recession, and the outcome was yawning inequality. The Mark Zuckerbergs of the world got 1.05 percent mortgages they did not even need, while everyone else got priced out of the Bay Area entirely.

At the same time, other policy forces came along to screw over many Millennials. Cities stopped building houses, causing or intensifying housing shortages and driving up rents. Millennials got locked out of the housing market for a decade, and prices had swelled by the time they were able to get in. As housing got more expensive, everything got more expensive, particularly child care. Student-loan debt soared too, yoking young people to decades of repayments.

Annie Lowrey: The great affordability crisis breaking America

The rise of the asset economy has not just disadvantaged the poor relative to the rich or the young relative to the old. It has also disadvantaged Black families relative to white families. Black students are more likely to have student-loan debt and more likely to owe large balances than their white counterparts, making it harder for them to save, buy homes, or start businesses. The housing bust hit Black homeowners far harder than it hit white homeowners, and relatively few Black families have benefited from the recent increase in prices. White families remain much richer than Black ones, and much more capable of passing wealth on, generation to generation.

Things started to turn around for the 99 percent during the Trump years. Wages started to tick up among low-income Americans, in part because of states and cities hiking their minimum wages. The jobless rate fell enough that the country neared full employment. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, Republicans were in charge, so they decided deficit spending was fine, and Congress suffused the economy with stimulus. Families are still living off the savings from the stimulus checks and extended unemployment-insurance payments and child allowances sent out during the Trump and Biden administrations.

But supply-chain problems, rising energy prices, and all that stimulus has ginned up the highest rates of inflation in four decades, forcing the Fed to hike interest rates. Once again, as in the ’70s, working families are getting sacked by rising prices as rich families watch their paper wealth go up in flames. We are in a bear market, a punishing one for the roughly half of Americans who own stock and a particularly punishing one for the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, who own about 90 percent of all equities. Trillions of dollars of wealth have vanished this year. Trillions of dollars more might vanish in the coming months. Low, low interest rates—ones that many people expected to be around for years to come—underpinned that entire run-up in wealth.

Despite the gyrations in the financial markets and the collapse in the price of homes, crypto, and so on, the underlying real economy retains some real strength. The unemployment rate is very low, and households have not yet pulled back on spending. But inflation is dampening consumer sentiment and bleeding working families of cash; gas prices are particularly troublesome. To try to return the country to price stability, the Federal Reserve is continuing to hike interest rates, raising its benchmark rate 0.75 percent this week, the biggest jump since 1994. The central bank has no track record of pulling off the kind of “soft landing” it is aiming for. There’s a good chance the Fed will smother so much demand that the unemployment rate will climb and the economy will shrink, putting millions of families in financial peril. Everybody might end up worse off for a while.

James Surowiecki: How did they get inflation so wrong?

In the future, should the Fed avoid lowering interest rates and flooding the country with money to avoid ginning up more inequality? That notion is certainly out there in progressive circles. “The basic thrust of the argument is that low interest rates make life sweet and easy for big corporate predators, who can do more of their bad predatory things thanks to lower financing costs. Stock valuations rise, the rich get richer, the powerful and corrupt thrive while the weak and ordinary are ignored,” writes Zachary D. Carter, the biographer of the economist John Maynard Keynes.


But this line of argumentation, as Carter notes, downplays the downsides of high interest rates for regular families. High interest rates mean slower growth means higher unemployment means smaller wage increases for low-income workers, in particular Black and Latino workers. In that way, low interest rates might help hold down wage inequality, even as they amp up wealth inequality. Sharply higher borrowing costs also make it harder for working families to pay off their credit cards, buy cars, start businesses, and fix up their homes.

The answer to our unequal age lies not in better monetary policy. It lies in better fiscal and regulatory policy. The central bank has enormous influence, but primarily over borrowing costs and the pace of economic growth. The power to alter the distribution of wealth and earnings—as well as expand the supply of child care, housing, energy, and everything else—lies with Congress. It could spend huge sums of money to hasten the country’s energy transition and make it less vulnerable to gas-price shocks. It could overhaul the country’s system of student-loan debt, helping Black families build wealth. It could break up monopolies and force companies to compete for workers and market share again. It could task states and cities with increasing their housing supplies, so that regular families could afford apartments in Queens and houses in Oakland and condo units in Washington, D.C. It could implement labor standards that would mean the middle class could afford to buy into the stock market too. Yet it remains hamstrung by the filibuster, and by a minority party dedicated to upward redistribution.


The problem with our asset age is not that so much wealth has been generated. It is that so much wealth has been generated for so few. If everyone could own some Facebook stock and a house in Palo Alto, everyone would be better off, even in a down market. But low interest rates cannot create that world on their own.

Annie Lowrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic.



资产经济的终结
不断上升的利率正在结束一个富人变得非常非常富有的时代。

作者：安妮-洛瑞
一顶高帽喷出三个下降趋势的箭头。
Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Shutterstock
2022年6月18日，美国东部时间上午6:30

关于作者。安妮-洛瑞是《大西洋》杂志的一名工作人员。

这是我时常想到的一点神秘的东西。马克-扎克伯格有一笔抵押贷款。

或者至少，他有过一次。十年前，这位Facebook创始人为他在帕洛阿尔托的一栋600万美元的豪宅进行再融资。当时他的身价是160亿美元，这意味着他可以直接买下那栋房子和其他一百多栋房子，不需要抵押贷款。但第一共和银行为他提供了可调整利率的贷款，初始利率仅为1.05%，低于通货膨胀率，这意味着金融家是在为借给他钱的特权付钱。扎克伯格保住了他在Facebook的持股，用税收优惠的债务装货，并受益于硅谷房地产价格的上涨。为什么不接受贷款？


"为什么不贷款？"这句话是对过去几十年来美国财富积累和阶级动态的一个很好的总结。长期的低利率已经转化为资产价值的飙升。这使得一小部分有能力投资于房屋、农田、股票、债券、商品、艺术品、专利、水权、初创企业、私募股权、对冲基金和其他资产的美国人富得惊人，助长了令人吃惊的财富不平等。由于劳动力参与率低，工资增长缓慢，美国看起来就像理论家Lisa Adkins、Melinda Cooper和Martijn Konings所说的 "资产经济"--在这种经济中，繁荣不是由你的收入而是由你拥有的东西决定的。

"为什么不贷款 "的日子至少是暂停了。美联储正在加息，因为它在努力抑制通货膨胀。这已将股票推入熊市（因为企业利润面临风险，投资者正在回撤到安全资产），住房市场进入调整（因为抵押贷款变得更加昂贵），科技行业进入自由落体（因为许多公司被要求提供利润，这是一次）。兼并、收购和初创企业的融资已经枯竭。而经济可能处于两年内第二次衰退的边缘，特别是如果油价持续高涨的话。在过去的半年里，动物精神和几百个额外的基点已经抹去了巨大的纸面财富：2万亿美元的加密货币，7万亿美元的股票，无法计算的房屋资产。

谢恩-菲利普斯。租房很糟糕。拥有的情况更糟。

不断上升的利率和螺旋式上升的通货膨胀可能会扼杀我们的资产资本主义时代，任何人都不能再获得1.05%的贷款，即使是最富有的人。这是否意味着一个新的经济平衡的到来，一个对资本不那么有利而对劳工更有利的平衡，对高财富的租户不那么有利而对普通的老租户更有利？令人不安的答案是否定的。低利率有助于促进增长和就业，即使它们助长了不平等。但高利率也不会建立一个更公平的经济。

在某些方面，这个金融时刻类似于一开始拉开我们这个宏大的不平等时代的那个时刻。在70年代，美国经济的特点是通货膨胀率高，工资增长强劲，资产价格下跌。(有趣的事实：标准普尔500指数在70年代基本上没有增值。) 通货膨胀侵蚀了工作家庭的收入，而停滞不前的资产价格挤压了高收入家庭。

然后，工作的报酬开始减少，所有权的报酬开始增加。分割劳动力和资本的力量很多，也很复杂。随着制造业的自动化和向海外转移，蓝领职业的雇员比例下降，工会化率也在下降。公司的规模不断扩大，而他们的税单却在下降，大公司对各自市场的主导地位变得更加绝对，金融经济也走向全球化。最低工资开始实际下降，政府放松了对运输、电信和金融部门的监管。所有这些因素都抑制了工资增长，同时抬高了企业利润，增加了投资回报。

随着时间的推移，财富不平等变得比收入不平等对社会更有害。问题不仅在于大公司的首席执行官的收入是外科医生的33倍，而外科医生的收入是小学教师的9倍，小学教师的收入是在一元店结账的人的两倍--尽管这是个问题。就是首席执行官还拥有收银员所住的所有公寓，而他们被压制的工资和高额的学生贷款意味着他们几乎付不起房租。"阿德金斯、库珀和科宁斯在他们的优秀论文《资产经济》中指出："形成不平等的关键因素不再是雇佣关系，而是一个人是否能够购买升值速度超过通货膨胀和工资的资产。"千禧一代是第一个全面体验这一现实的人"。

这一现实在奥巴马时期的货币过剩和财政紧缩中得到了充分体现。自80年代初以来，借贷成本一直在下降。当全球金融危机爆发时，美联储将利率一直降至零，并开始购买数万亿美元的安全金融资产，刺激投资者进行投资。中央银行的官员们以他们自己的方式乞求国会议员花更多的钱来帮助美联储使国家走出低谷。相反，在巴拉克-奥巴马的第一个任期内，在第一轮刺激措施的吝啬之后，政治家们开始缩减赤字。

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这种一手交钱、一手交货的政策组合有助于降低失业率，尽管没有像国家部署更多刺激措施时那样多。它还将大量的资金冲进了金融市场和企业的账簿。由于资金基本上可以自由借贷，富人们纷纷买下了公寓和指数基金。企业收购了他们的竞争对手，并吸纳了自己的股份。工人家庭则步履蹒跚。美联储帮助国家避免了双底衰退，而结果是巨大的不平等。世界上的马克-扎克伯格得到了他们甚至不需要的1.05%的抵押贷款，而其他人则完全被挤出了湾区。

同时，其他的政策力量也出现了，使许多千禧一代受到了影响。城市停止建房，造成或加剧了住房短缺，推动了租金上涨。千禧一代被锁在住房市场之外达十年之久，当他们能够进入住房市场时，房价已经膨胀。随着住房越来越贵，一切都变得越来越贵，特别是儿童护理。学生贷款的债务也急剧上升，使年轻人不得不承担几十年的还款。

安妮-洛瑞：打破美国的巨大负担能力危机

资产经济的崛起不仅使穷人相对于富人或年轻人相对于老年人处于不利地位。相对于白人家庭而言，它也使黑人家庭处于不利地位。与白人学生相比，黑人学生更可能有学生贷款债务，更可能欠下大笔余额，这使他们更难储蓄、买房或创业。房地产萧条对黑人房主的打击远远大于对白人房主的打击，相对来说，很少有黑人家庭从最近的房价上涨中受益。白人家庭仍然比黑人家庭富裕得多，而且更有能力将财富一代一代地传下去。

在特朗普时代，99%的人的情况开始好转。低收入美国人的工资开始上升，部分原因是各州和城市提高了最低工资。失业率下降到足以使国家接近充分就业。当冠状病毒大流行时，共和党人掌权，所以他们决定赤字支出是好的，国会用刺激措施充实经济。在特朗普和拜登政府期间，家庭仍在依靠经济刺激支票和延长的失业保险金和儿童津贴的储蓄过活。

但是，供应链问题、能源价格上涨以及所有这些刺激措施已经造成了四十年来最高的通货膨胀率，迫使美联储加息。和70年代一样，工人家庭再次被不断上涨的物价解雇，而富人家庭则看着他们的纸面财富化为乌有。我们正处在一个熊市中，对于大约一半拥有股票的美国人来说，这是一个惩罚性的熊市，对于拥有全部股票约90%的最富有的10%的美国人来说，这是一个特别的惩罚。今年已经有数万亿美元的财富消失了。在未来几个月，可能还会有数万亿美元消失。许多人预计低利率将在未来几年内存在，低利率是整个财富增长的基础。

尽管金融市场出现波动，房屋、加密货币等价格崩溃，但基本的实体经济仍然保持着一些真正的力量。失业率非常低，家庭还没有缩减开支。但是，通货膨胀正在抑制消费者的情绪，使工作家庭的现金流失；汽油价格尤其令人担忧。为了试图让国家恢复价格稳定，美联储正在继续加息，本周将其基准利率提高了0.75%，这是自1994年以来最大的跳跃。该央行没有实现其目标的 "软着陆 "的记录。美联储很有可能会扼杀大量需求，以至于失业率攀升，经济萎缩，使数百万家庭陷入财务困境。每个人最终都可能在一段时间内变得更糟。

詹姆斯-苏洛维茨基：他们是如何把通货膨胀搞得如此糟糕的？

在未来，美联储是否应该避免降低利率和用钱淹没国家以避免造成更多的不平等？这种观念在进步人士的圈子里肯定是存在的。"这种说法的基本要旨是，低利率使大公司掠夺者的生活变得甜蜜而轻松，由于融资成本降低，他们可以做更多的坏的掠夺性事情。经济学家约翰-梅纳德-凯恩斯（John Maynard Keynes）的传记作者扎卡里-D-卡特（Zachary D. Carter）写道："股票估值上升，富人更加富有，有权有势的人和腐败分子蓬勃发展，而弱者和普通人却被忽视。


但正如卡特指出的那样，这种论证方式淡化了高利率对普通家庭的不利影响。高利率意味着增长放缓，意味着失业率上升，意味着低收入工人，特别是黑人和拉丁裔工人的工资增长减少。这样一来，低利率可能有助于抑制工资不平等，即使它们加剧了财富不平等。急剧上升的借贷成本也使工薪家庭更难偿还他们的信用卡，购买汽车，创办企业，以及修复他们的房屋。

解决我们不平等时代的答案不在于更好的货币政策。它在于更好的财政和监管政策。中央银行有巨大的影响力，但主要是对借贷成本和经济增长的速度。改变财富和收入分配--以及扩大儿童护理、住房、能源和其他一切的供应--的权力在于国会。它可以花费巨额资金来加速国家的能源转型，使其不那么容易受到天然气价格的冲击。它可以彻底改革国家的学生贷款债务制度，帮助黑人家庭创造财富。它可以打破垄断，迫使公司重新为工人和市场份额展开竞争。它可以责成各州和各城市增加住房供应，使普通家庭能够买得起皇后区的公寓、奥克兰的房子和华盛顿特区的公寓单元。它可以实施劳工标准，这意味着中产阶级也能买得起股票。然而，它仍然被 "拉布 "和一个致力于向上再分配的少数党所束缚。


我们的资产时代的问题不是因为产生了这么多财富。而是这么多的财富是为这么少的人创造的。如果每个人都能拥有一些Facebook的股票和帕洛阿尔托的房子，那么每个人都会过得更好，即使是在市场下滑的时候。但低利率本身并不能创造这样的世界。

安妮-洛瑞是《大西洋》杂志的一名工作人员。