Debt-to-income ratio in different income groups 2016 Percentage of disposable income 400  400  350  350  300  300  250  250  200  200  150  150  100  100  50  50  0  0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  Note. The columns show the median in each decile group. Data for July 2016. The high debt ratio in the lowest income group should be interpreted with a certain amount of caution, as this group includes, among others, households with highly varied incomes, for example households with negative income. Source: The Riksbank  In addition to households having different sizes of assets and liabilities that are affected by interest rates to different degrees, there may also be other dimensions that play a role in how the distribution of income and wealth is affected by a period of very expansionary monetary policy. For instance, one can imagine that household that are used to managing their assets and liabilities have better conditions for safeguarding themselves against or benefitting from the effects of monetary policy on interest rates and asset prices. However, the distributional effects of monetary policy do not come solely through changes in nominal interest rates and asset prices. Ultimately, it is the effect when consideration is given to inflation that is important. And the composition of household wealth is also significant in this context.
The distributional effects of the central banks’ asset purchases have been in focus in, for instance, the United States, the United Kingdom and in Germany, where there has been considerable discussion of the effects of low interest rates for savers.1 In Sweden, the Riksdag Committee on Finance has included distributional effects in the questions that are to be included in the ongoing review of the monetary policy framework and the Sveriges Riksbank Act – in the terms of reference for the review it says that the committee making the review shall consider in particular whether the Riksbank should give consideration to the consequences that conventional and unconventional monetary policy may have on, for instance, the distribution of income in the economy.2 Explaining why the distribution of income and wealth changes is a challenge that is not made easier by the fact that the statistics in some cases lag behind and in other cases have large gaps. Those of you who have read Piketty's best-seller Capital in the Twenty-First Century also know that one can give the question of distributional effects much greater room than I have scope for today. What I want to say with these reservations is that those of you who are expecting to hear exactly how great the distributional effects of monetary policy have been will  1 See, for instance, the Bank of England (2012), OECD (2015), Bindseil et al. (2015), Deutsche Bundesbank (2016),  European Parliament (2016), Domanski et al. (2016) and Amaral (2017).