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Do Deficits Make You Rich?

The uncomfortable truth: fiscal stimulus creates wealth, not consumer inflation.

Sat pondering in a Caribbean bar, thinking about intelligence, the Fed, deficits, and why inflation lives in Wall Street not in your supermarket basket. When the government runs a deficit, it injects reserves into the system, an automatic overdraft with the banking system. Later it issues Treasuries that drain those reserves. Economists call it a swap. Net financial wealth in the private sector rises because no one in the private sector owes that shortfall. The government owes it. Not another private entity.

So does government spending make you rich? Deficits don’t spill into the supermarket, they seep into the trading book. Treasuries move through repo markets, pledged and rehypothecated, transformed into money-like instruments that lubricate leverage. CPI stays calm while portfolios swell. Fiscal deficits expand collateral, leverage builds, and asset prices rise. The inflation we should fear isn’t at the checkout counter. It’s in the mirror of prudence we call Wall Street.

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