Things to Read on the Afternoon of November 15, 2013

Things You Must Read:

1. Gillian Tett: Treasury ownership marks wealth divide: “Who owns America’s… debt?… [F]oreigners… in 2008… breached 50%…. Back in the 1970s… the richest 1% of Americans ‘only’ held 17% of… federal bonds… in private sector hands… 42 percent in 2013…”
2. Eduardo Porter: Rethinking the Rise of Inequality: “Workers with a bachelor’s degree still earn almost twice as much as high school graduates…. Still… growing skepticism… has fed into a deeper unease… [and] given new vigor to a critique… that challenges the idea that educational disparities are a main driver of economic inequality…”
3. Sarah Kliff: Study: Medicaid, private insurance give same access to health care: “The GAO recently took a deep dive… [and] found… Medicaid beneficiaries tend to have nearly as good access to medical care as those on private coverage…. There is a relatively big gap in dental care…”

Things You Should Read:

1. Mark Thoma: Economist’s View: Pushing on a String: US Monetary Policy is Less Powerful During Recessions
2. Ryan Avent: Blame Germany, for Frankfurt?: “German members of the ECB… led a six-man revolt against Thursday’s move to cut the… lending rate…. Germany does not want to give any ground… doesn’t want to write the periphery cheques… doesn’t want to backstop their finances… doesn’t want to run bigger fiscal deficits… doesn’t want to reduce its current-account surplus… doesn’t want to accept even a little more inflation. One is tempted to conclude that it doesn’t want to be a part of the euro area…”
3. Olivier Coibion and Yuriy Gorodnichenko: Inflation expectations and the missing disinflation: “Advanced economies have not experienced the disinflation… historically… associated with high unemployment…. Using consumers’ (as opposed to forecasters’) inflation expectations restores the traditional Phillips curve…. Consumers… are more responsive to oil prices…. The increase in oil prices between 2009 and 2012 may in fact have prevented the onset of pernicious deflationary dynamics…”
4. Matthew Yglesias: Goosing Stocks or Punishing Savers?: “The Hard Money Caucus can’t quite decide what the problem… is. Bob Corker… complained that low interest rates and quantitative easing are artificially boosting the stock market and exacerbating inequality…. Pat Toomey… complained that low interest rates and quantitative easing are punishing savers. I don’t think either of those is really true. But what I’m sure of is that you can’t simultaneously boost the stock market and punish savers…”

Things You Should Be Aware of:

Paul Krugman (2008): Optimal Fiscal Policy in a Liquidity Trap | Arthur Okun: Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff |Òscar Jordà, Moritz Schularick, and Alan Taylor:* Private and public debt in crises: 1870 to now |

Annalee Newitz: Viral Journalism and the Valley of Ambiguity | Mark Thoma: Explainer: How does the Fed stimulate the economy? | Bruce Bartlett: How America’s Health System Stacks Up Against Other Developed Countries | Brad Plumer: The U.S. labor force is still shrinking. Here’s why |