Charles Wolf Jr. was a senior economic adviser and corporate fellow in international economics at the RAND Corporation. He contributed articles to The Weekly Standard analyzing monetary policy and international economic issues, including Federal Reserve policy and Chinese currency matters. A distinguished economist, he was also a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Last month, China devalued its currency, slightly lowering the bottom of the range within which market forces can determine the yuan’s foreign exchange value. The central bank’s announcement triggered severe repercussions in global financial markets—but it was inaccurate and incomplete.
Income inequality in the United States has been increasing for a generation. The share of pretax income received by the top 1 percent of earners rose from 7.8 percent in 1973 to 17.4 percent in 2010. A broader and widely used measure of inequality—the Gini coefficient—indicates that inequality for…