All of this is one more reason to prefer the NGDP path target promoted by Scott Sumner and his merry Market Monetarists. It might prove difficult in practice to target inflation without paying some especial attention to wage growth. But a central bank can target the path of aggregate expenditure without playing favorites about who pays what to whom. Simple neutrality by the central bank in the contest between capital and labor would be a huge improvement over the status quo.
Note that even if the central bank is no longer playing "favorites", monetary policy would still have a distributional impact. For example, reverting to the pre-recession path of nominal spending would likely entail a temporarily higher rate of inflation than currently expected. And higher than expected inflation will indeed create some winners and losers:
However, the biggest losers are creditors who are almost by definition wealthy, since people owe them money. If a creditor has lent out $100 million at 2 percent interest (e.g. buying a 10-year U.S. or German government bond) and the inflation rate rises from 2 percent to 4 percent, this creditor has lost an amount equal to 100 percent of his expected income or 2 percent of his wealth. This is a far larger loss than any worker could experience as a result of this increase in the inflation rate.
Who would be the winners?
Also, most workers are debtors to some extent. They are likely to have mortgage debt, credit care debt, student loan debt and or car debt. A higher rate of inflation means that they can repay this debt in money that is worth less than the money they borrowed.
And once again, we get to the same place - changing monetary policy at this juncture would likely have significant impacts on the distribution of income and wealth. And an unwillingness to alter this current distribution is likely another reason we would not expect the Federal Reserve to change their basic policy framework away from the current 2 percent inflation target regime.
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