How Republicans and Democrats enhanced inequality by undermining financial regulation

Tackling inequality has become a clarion call for politicians on both the right and the left. But in order to address the problem, we need to have better insights into how the current levels of economic equality became so entrenched. In new research which examines nearly 100 years of data, Nathan J. Kelly and Eric Keller find that financial deregulation has contributed to America’s dramatic shift toward greater income concentration. They write that for most of the 20th century, Democratic control of the Senate made financial regulation more likely, but that from the 1980s, onwards, partly due to growing campaign contributions from the financial sector, the party converged with the Republicans’ neoliberal enthusiasm for deregulation.