[cure]

This. For years now everyone has been saying "where is the (consumer price) inflation"? Meanwhile real estate prices are rising fast (in desirable parts of the country) and the stock market has been on an epic bull run. It's obvious that the inflation is in the asset prices.

This is a dangerous trend. The rich (who tend to own those assets) get richer and and the poor (who rent/live paycheck to paycheck) get more and more desperate. If we don't find a way to reduce the inequality, this is going to mean serious trouble down the line.

[mrep]

> Meanwhile real estate prices are rising fast (in desirable parts of the country)

Mainly just the west coast and that's because their cities are built in valleys with a fixed amount of land, restrictive zoning on said land causing a fixed amount of housing and thus the bidding up housing prices.

For the rest of the country, inflation adjusted price per square foot hasn't really changed [0].

> the stock market has been on an epic bull run. It's obvious that the inflation is in the asset prices.

Inflation adjusted Annualized S&P 500 Returns with Dividends Reinvested for the past 15 years are 6.738% versus 7.690% for the 15 years before that [1]. Albeit, if you just started in 2009, it has been quite epic considering it was the longest bull run in US history.

[0]: https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/

[1]: https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/

[pas]

Piketty tried to analyze this, and the idea is to have a minimal wealth tax. (I have no idea what's the current best evaluation/assessment of his work and this idea, but Land Value Tax is something many economists already favor, and it'd help decouple the pain of growing cities from housing as an investment.)

So similarly there is probably some sense in trying to counteract low-interest-rate inflated asset bubbles via some kind of tax or other financial structure. (A progressive capital gains tax might help, but that might just make markets less efficient by introducing a chilling effect on the high end.)

In the end this is a purely political question, because obviously the problem is not that it's unfair that some very "desirable" assets price inflates, but that the majority of the population did not have the means to buy into it before the inflation happened to reap the capital gains.

There's already serious trouble due to inequality. (The recent protests about police brutality follow a long series of other symptoms that highlight how socioeconomic inequality manifests and persists on an ethnic level.)

[mixmastamyk]

> inflation is in the asset prices. The rich… get richer

Numbers rising don’t equal values rising, the definition of inflation. It benefits borrowers as well.