The Race Between Asset Supply and Asset Demand

Adrien Auclert, Hannes Malmberg, Matthew Rognlie and Ludwig Straub

No 34470, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We introduce an asset supply-and-demand approach to analyze the trajectory of US aggregate wealth, real interest rates, and fiscal sustainability. Our framework uses micro-founded and easy-to-implement sufficient statistics to quantify how shifts in demographics, inequality, and other forces affect asset market equilibrium. From 1950 to the present, rapid population aging, rising income inequality, increasing foreign demand for US assets, and declining productivity growth all contributed to a surge in asset demand. Asset supply initially fell, then turned around sharply, mainly driven by increases in government debt and the value of capitalized profits. Overall, asset demand won the race, and interest rates fell. Looking ahead to 2100, population aging will continue to strongly push up asset demand, but at current tax and benefit levels, asset supply will win the race, as rising entitlement costs push up government debt even more. While rising asset demand creates space for debt to eventually reach 250% of GDP without higher interest rates, stabilizing debt at any level requires a permanent fiscal adjustment of at least 10% of GDP.

JEL-codes: E20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-fdg
Note: EFG ME
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34470.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34470

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34470
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().