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Since the end of the civil rights movement, the United States has not made meaningful progress toward closing the racial wealth gap. Without deliberate policy intervention, this gap will likely persist. Racial justice activists and policymakers, aiming in part to close this gap, have put forth various reparations programs. Others have proposed race-neutral wealth redistribution policies that also promise to address the gap, but as an indirect consequence of redistributing wealth in general. The potential impact of this second set of proposals on racial wealth inequality remains understudied. This article addresses this deficit through counterfactual historical simulation: By assessing the thirty-year impact of these race-neutral proposals, it finds significant reductions in the racial wealth gap over a generation. Yet these race-neutral programs have limitations vis-à-vis the broader goals of racial justice; this article concludes by emphasizing the unique capacities of reparations programs to address these limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the bond market agenda of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the incentives it provides to dealers, trading systems and other market services. Topics discussed include recommendation to the SEC to enhance the efficiency of bond markets, an overview of the organization of the bond market, the regulation of bond trading, and factors that may influence the evolution of bond trading.

Two hallmarks of U.S. monetary policy since the 1981–1982 recession are declining interest rates and moderation in inflation, at least until recently. Coincident with these trends was a surge in U.S. wealth inequality, with the Gini coefficient up by 0.070 between 1983 and 2019. This article analyzes the connection between these two developments on the basis of the Survey of Consumer Finances. Contrary to expectations, the article finds that these two monetary effects reduced wealth inequality rather than increasing it. The effect is quite sizeable, with the Gini coefficient declining by 0.045 over these years. Asset price changes and debt devaluation also accounted for 72.6 percent of the advance of mean wealth and would have led to a 204.9 percent gain in median wealth compared to its actual rise of 23.4 percent. Moreover, they helped lower the racial wealth gap rather than enlarging it. These results are at odds with previous literature in which estimates range from a weak negative effect on inequality to neutral, small positive, and strong positive. In terms of methodology, this article differs from previous work by focusing on only the direct effects of interest rate changes and inflation on the household balance sheet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]