1/14/2015
Here’s an interesting article from “The Economist” on the topic:
Without some moderate inflation of currency, the necessary economic incentives which retain essential “velocity” on money, i.e. spending and investment of current income, decline. If they decline too much, the economy spins down, people sit on their cash, and things grind to a halt. Not a good scenario. This is why, in our subscriber section, we are increasing emphasis on monitoring of the indicators not directly tied to inflation and money supply. We are increasing our watchfulness and emphasis on indicators which represent monetary velocity (spending and investment), to provide some visibility of any recession on the horizon.
One thing we can also suggest, to the Fed and other central banks which are just now getting “permission” to buy government issued securities, is that the interest payments on those securities might be temporarily (or permanently) forgiven, such that the government funds originally intended for interest payments to those central banks, could be instead spent on current projects which increase economic activity, such as infrastructure improvements, basic research, and even temporary public employment projects. There is no net effect on federal budgets, because the funds come from forgiven interest payments, so deficits do not increase, and federal borrowing does not increase. There are other ways which governments could inject those funds into the economy as well, such as via currency surrogates with limited lifetimes (i.e. vouchers) which would have to be spent by particular dates.
There is still plenty of room for creative solutions which are not harmful in the long term.