Authored by Sean Corrigan, originally posted at TrueSinews.com,
That usually perceptive and always interesting observer of the financial Zeitgeist, Bloomberg’s estimable Mark Gilbert, recently penned an article entitled: ‘Milton Friedman’s ‘Helicopter Money’ Is Looking Less Crazy.’ In response, I mailed him the comments which follow (with light editing) here.
After running through the standard complaints of the serial interventionists about how ineffective monetary policy has become (read: how we ordinary people keep frustrating their Olympian schemes), Mark concluded his piece:-
‘Zero or negative interest rates are failing to stir consumer prices, while the Fed’s attempt to normalize monetary policy looks likely to backfire embarrassingly. Because the money-machine isn’t doing what the rule book suggests it should, the engines of economic growth continue to splutter and misfire. So the argument that might in the end have the most appeal for Friedman is the one that, intellectually at least, appears to be the weakest: If everything else is failing, why not try helicopter money? ‘ Why not, indeed? Well, here is a by no means exhaustive list of several reasons for not crossing yet another bridge too far in the mindless pursuit of a specific annual rate of change in a smoothed, filtered, hedonised, sampling of a wholly arbitrary collection of consumer goods and services, to the exclusion of all other goals, the repudiation of the lessons of past experience, and the complete abnegation of common sense.
This post was published at Zero Hedge on 03/26/2016 –.
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