Can rising asset prices reduce wealth inequality? This paper builds a continuous-time heterogeneous-agent general equilibrium in which entrepreneurs hold risky private capital and traditional savers hold safe assets. Safe-asset expansions—via financial innovation, public debt, or a stable equity bubble—operate through a single pass-through: they lower entrepreneurs’ undiversified risk exposure, compress risk premia, and raise the interest rate.

“There is so much intrusion from all sides and corners,” a Sami reindeer herder tells me, reacting to a government decision to grant a mining permit in Gállok in the Sápmi region in Sweden’s far north.

Sápmi is the communal land of the Indigenous Sami people. Their land ranges through northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.

The dominant global financial position of the US and its currency, the dollar, is wobbling under the second Trump administration. AURA88 / ShutterstockThe US has long sat at the centre of the global financial system, with the US dollar serving as the backbone of the world economy. Private investors rely on the dollar as a store of value in times of uncertainty.

Hearings that began Wednesday in Washington reflected anxiety over the future of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade pact and whether the president could end up scrapping it.