Still, the distributional picture also has to take into account the second type of effects – wealth effects – which capture the impact of monetary policy on the value of financial assets. Are those effects accruing mainly to the rich and so worsening wealth inequality? Here again the Household Finance and Consumption Survey allows us to make some suggestions.
What we see is that euro area households’ that hold financial assets – stocks and bonds – are strongly concentrated in the top end of net wealth distribution. As such, only a fairly small subset of the population benefits from capital gains in bond and equity markets; three quarters of the population fail to benefit at all.