This guy definately gets it...

The consumer is broke. So cut him a check and get on with our lives. This is not an economic problem but a political problem. The gang that owns our government are screwing us big time!!

We gave them all that stimulus and they banked the money and bought and speculated in oil, food and currencies. Give us the money and we will pick the winners in the corporate world with our spending and take the power away from these crooks.

interfluidity » Monetary policy for the 21st century

Here’s my proposal. We should try to arrange things so that the marginal unit of CPI is purchased with “helicopter drop” money. That is, rather than trying to fine-tune wages, asset prices, or credit, central banks should be in the business of fine tuning a rate of transfers from the bank to the public. During depressions and disinflations, the Fed should be depositing funds directly in bank accounts at a fast clip. During booms, the rate of transfers should slow to a trickle. We could reach the “zero bound”, but a different zero bound than today’s zero interest rate bugaboo. At the point at which the Fed is making no transfers yet inflation still threatens, the central bank would have to coordinate with Congress to do “fiscal policy” in the form of negative transfers, a.k.a. taxes. However, this zero bound would be reached quite rarely if we allow transfers to displace credit expansion as the driver of money growth in the economy. In other words, at the same time as we expand the use of “helicopter money” in monetary policy, we should regulate and simplify banks, impose steep capital requirements, and relish complaints that this will “reduce credit availability”. The idea is to replace the macroeconomic role of bank credit with freshly issued cash.

Of course we will still need investors. But all that transfered money will become somebody’s savings, and having reduced the profitability of leveraged financial intermediaries, much of that will find its way to some form of equity investing.

There are details to consider. Won’t this proposal render central banks almost immediately insolvent? After all, conventionally, currency is a liability of a central bank that must be offset by some asset, or the balance sheet will show a gigantic hole where the bank’s equity ought to be. But that’s easy to remedy. Central banks can just adopt an old accounting fudge and claim that policy-motivated transfers purchase an intangible asset called “goodwill”. But, you may object, fudging the accounts doesn’t alter economic realities. Quite so! But what are the economic realities here? Balance sheet insolvency is nothing more or less than a predictor of illiquidity. No firm goes out of business because it’s shareholder equity goes negative. Firms die when they are presented with a bill that they cannot cover. But a central bank with liabilities in its own notes can never be illiquid, since it can produce cash at will to satisfy any obligation. It is book insolvency, not intangible goodwill, that would misrepresent the economic condition of the bank. If the central bank does not pay interest on reserves (which it should not), currency’s status as a “liability” is entirely formal. Central bank accounts should be defined by economic substance, not by blind analogy to the accounts of other firms. The purpose of a central bank’s balance sheet is to present a snapshot of its cumulative interventions, not to measure solvency. Consistent with that objective, a placeholder asset that offsets the formal liability incurred from past transfers would render transparent the cumulative stock and net flow of policy-motivated transfers. [1]

Then there are more interesting problems, like how routinizing transfers from the central bank to citizens might reshape society. “Free money” would certainly carry consequences, both good and bad, foreseeable and unforeseeable. My suggestion would be that the central banks should make equal transfers to all adult citizens irrespective of income, job, or tax status. That would be simple to understand and administer, and it is “fair” on face. It has other good points. To the degree that transfers are motivated by wasteful idleness of real resources (e.g. unemployment), flat transfers are guaranteed to put money in the hands of cash-constrained people who will spend it. Flat transfers are much more effective stimulus than income tax