Daily Archives: Sep 14, 2019 at 06:40 am EDT

Book Bits | 14 September 2019

The Case For People’s Quantitative Easing
By Frances Coppola
Review via Brave New Europe
The thesis behind the book is that, although quantitative easing since the Great Financial Crisis of 2007/8 has failed, the cause of failure was its implementation, not the policy itself. Quantitative easing was a policy proposed by Milton Friedman and Ann Schwartz back in 1963 as a way to counter a financial depression, or “Great Contraction” as they termed it. The idea was to radically increase the money supply, providing consumers with money to resuscitate the economy. Five years later Friedman used the metaphor of a helicopter dropping money over communities to achieve this goal. He emphasised that it had to be a one-off event to discourage people from saving it, thinking there was more to come. Following the Great Financial Crisis, central banks worldwide initiated Friedman’s policy of helicopter money, dispensing trillions of dollars. However, as Coppola explains, this massive use of quantitative easing, or the “Great Experiment”, failed because” Friedman’s “‘helicopter drop” came to mean not putting money into people’s pockets, but rather casting money blindly onto international financial markets without regard to where it would end up. The desired result did not happen; instead we find ourselves in the “Long Stagnation”.
Continue reading