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From Whence Cometh Our Wealth - The People's Labor Or The Fed’s Printing Press?
Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,
It is hard to believe that in these allegedly enlightened times this question even needs to be asked. Are there really educated adults who believe that by dropping helicopter money conjured from thin air, the central bank can actually make society wealthier?
Well, yes there are. They spread this lunacy from the most respectable MSM platforms. And, no, I’m not talking about professor Krugman and his New York Times column. At least, he pontificates from a Keynesian framework that has a respectable, if erroneous, intellectual heritage.
What I am talking about here is the mindless bunkum issued by so-called financial journalists who swish around Wall Street and Washington exchanging knowing tidbits with policy-makers, deal-makers and each other. Call it the bubble finance “narrative”, and recognize that its gets more uncoupled from economic facts, logic and plausibility with each passing day in the casino.
The estimable folks at The Automatic Earth put a bright spotlight on this crucial matter this morning, even if not by design. Their trademark daily vintage photo was a 1911 picture of a family including all the kids picking berries in the field; they were making GDP the old fashioned way.
In its usual manner, the site’s “debt rattle” list of links to timely reads followed, and the first was a Bloomberg View opinion piece called “QE For The People: Monetary Policy For The Next Recession” by one Clive Crook. It was actually a case for literally dropping central bank money from the skies to enable policy-makers to better “support demand and keep their economies running”.
In thoughtfully supplying a photo of a helicopter in full flight to accompany Crook’s discourse, the Bloomberg graphics department crystalized the essential economic issue of our times. Namely, whether wealth is made by the Berrie Pickers or the Money Printers.
Needless to say, The Automatic Earth’s vintage photo reminds us how GDP is actually made. And, no, its not about child labor. I grew up in a family farm labor force of five kids and ended up no worse for the wear. But we did produce something—lots of strawberries, raspberries, tomatoes, peaches, grapes and apples.
Lewis Wickes Hine Whole family works, Browns Mills, New Jersey 1910
Not surprisingly, the house organ of the Bloomberg empire—the very offspring of bubble finance—- says wealth can be made by dropping trillions of dollars of unearned money from helicopters. Back in the day, even berry-picking kids wouldn’t have believed that.

It used to be that “helicopter money” was a sort of metaphor—-certainly the great libertarian, Milton Friedman, did not literally mean that the state should engage in airborne redistribution through the aegis of the central bank when he famously coined the term. No longer. Here is what Bloomberg’s apparently lapsed Onion contributor said this morning:
Sooner rather than later, attention therefore needs to turn to a new kind of unconventional monetary policy: helicopter money…. (or) how about “QE for the people” instead? It has a nice populist ring to it — suggesting a convergence of financial excess and the Communist Manifesto…… “Overt monetary financing” is closer to what’s required, but something even duller would be better.
Whatever you call it, the idea is far from crazy. Lately, more economists have been advocating it, and they’re right.
The logic is simple. If central banks need to expand demand — and interest rates can’t be cut any further — let them send a check to every citizen. Much of this money would be spent, boosting demand just as Friedman said.
Uncle Milton must be rolling in his grave. Yet, in a way, he asked for it. He erroneously taught the world that capitalism can catastrophically fail if the central bank allows money and credit to be liquidated too intensively and extensively.
To be sure, he did not believe this was an everyday risk on the free market; he was talking about the Great Depression of 1930-1933, but he had his causative factors upside down. During the period in question, excess bank reserves—–the stuff the Fed creates—-soared by 13X, while money market interest rates fell close to zero. So the banking system was actually awash with liquidity, meaning that a Bernanke-style bond-buying spree would have amounted to pushing on a string, exactly as has been the case since the Lehman meltdown.
Instead, the problem in October 1929 was 15 years of massive, Fed-fueled credit creation—first to finance the Great War and then the Wall Street boom in foreign bonds and domestic stocks during the Roaring Twenties. The result of that era’s financial bubble was a massive, unsustainable expansion of US export capacity in agriculture and industry alike——along with bloated levels of industrial inventories, capital goods production and big ticket durable goods (autos, radios and refrigerators).
When the music stopped, the washout in these sectors resulted in a $35 billion drop over the next three years—or 75% of the total plunge in nominal GDP during the 1929-1933 period. Not surprisingly, therefore, this contraction of bubble-fueled economic activity triggered massive insolvencies in the export-oriented agricultural and industrial districts and in the speculative precincts of Wall Street and their wire house affiliates all across the country.
In short, the Great Depression did not represent a catastrophic failure of capitalism nor was it the result of a giant error by the central bank. And most assuredly, it was not owing to a deficiency of some mystical economic ether that the Keynesians were subsequently pleased to call “aggregate demand”.
Plain and simple, the Great Depression was caused by massive insolvencies of banks, businesses and households in the agricultural hinterlands and the new auto, steel and industrial export belt of the upper Midwest and mid-Atlantic. The four-year decline of nominal GDP from $100 billion to $57 billion did not represent the disappearance of “aggregate demand” that could be reincarnated by the state and its central banking branch. As I detailed in the Great Deformation, it represented the liquidation of malinvestment and phony GDP, jobs, production and residual war-time inflation that had never represented real wealth in the first place.
Nevertheless, statists have lived off the false proposition that capitalism is catastrophe prone and is chronically lapsing into recessionary slumps and under-performance ever since. But at least until the Greenspan era, the primary tool of state intervention to purportedly keep the macro economy off the shoals and on the path toward “full employment” was fiscal—–that is, deficit spending and tax cuts.
And that kind of state action to improve upon the alleged inferior performance of producers, consumers, investors, entrepreneurs and speculators on the free market entailed at least some outer boundaries. To wit, hereditary fear of too much national debt kept the politicians from outright free lunch economics—even after the Reagan era destroyed the will of the old guard GOP budget balancers.
As it happened, it was Greenspan who confected the bridge from fiscal stimulus by the unruly and inconstant processes of political democracy to central bank based monetary stimulus based on the purported wisdom of an unelected monetary elite. Slowly at first, and then with a rush during his post dotcom interest rate slashing campaign, Greenspan converted the old counter-cyclical doctrines of the first generation Keynesians, who made a stagflationary hash out of the US economy during the late 1960s and 1970s, into the bubble finance economy which prevails today.
Clive Crook is simply the archetype of today’s swarm of financial journalists who were house-trained on Dr.Greenspan’s doctrine of statist economics. Always and everywhere, both the old-style fiscal Keynesians and the new style Greenspan/Bernanke/Yellen money printers, postulate that the macro-economy suffers from a deficiency of “aggregate demand”.
And why wouldn’t they argue just so? If the family in the figurative berry patch pictured above is not spending enough to meet the policy-makers’ arbitrary growth targets—whether because it does not produce enough income or chooses to save a purportedly “excessive” portion—-then what economic agency can pour more spending into the nation’s economic bathtub until it is full up to the very brim? Why the state, of course.
But here’s the insidious thing. There is no such thing as “aggregate demand” which is separate and apart from production and income. The only way an economy can spend more than it produces is to finance excess consumption from artificially conjured credit.
Now, admittedly, that works——but only so long as balance sheets have available runway and the servicing cost of higher leverage does not overtax the carrying capacity of current incomes. In other words, credit expansion has temporal and economic limits; its not a feature of some mythical, timeless, dynamic stochastic general equilibrium!
Well, those limits have been reached and we are therefore in a new, post-Keynesian ball game. The US economy hit “peak household debt” at the time of the crisis. Accordingly, central bank fueled credit expansion has been exposed as the one-time parlor trick it actually was.
During the decades leading up to the great financial crisis, household leverage levels were ratcheted higher and higher during each stimulus cycle, causing income based household spending to be topped-up with incremental outlays from higher borrowings. But now the process has been reversed: household leverage ratios are falling, even as they remain far above their healthy and sustainable pre-1970 norms.
So household consumption is once again tethered to current income and savings preferences, as it must be on a long-run basis. You couldn’t have an economy based on the inevitable normalization of interest rates and, say, 400% debt to wage and salary income ratios, too. So the credit fueled boom of 1970-2008 wasn’t the normal capitalist condition; it was a trick of the state.
To be sure, that monetary financing trick did generate the illusion of growth. But it wasn’t sustainable. Accordingly, the tepid growth rate since the pre-crisis peak——that is, just a 1.0% annualized gain in real final sales for the last eight years—-simply represents the limits of a production and supply-side constrained economy.
During the 40 years leading up to the year 2000, nominal wages in the private economy grew by 7.5% annually, while CPI inflation averaged 4.5% per annum. So real wages grew by 3.0% and with some help from the ratchet in household leverage and total credit relative to GDP, real GDP growth averaged 3.6%.
By contrast, from December 2007 and up to and including this morning’s personal income and spending report for April, private sector wage and salary growth have decelerated sharply—-to just 2.5% at an annual rate for the last eight years. Even if you credit the BLS’ undercount of actual inflation, which has posted at 1.5% per annum during the same period, real wages have grown at just 1.0% per annum or by one-third of their historic trend. And with a discount for actual real world inflation, real aggregate wages have grown hardly at all.
In short, we now have a 1% growth economy, not the 3.6% economy of the Keynesian yesteryear. Households are spending at levels constrained by the tepid growth of their production and incomes, not because some magic ether called “aggregate demand” has gone missing.
It goes without saying, of course, that if you want to expand a supply constrained economy at a higher rate, the answer is to reduce the state’s barriers to enterprise and labor input, not to expand the central bank’s balance sheet and further falsify money market prices and inducements for rent-seeking speculation. For instance, abolish the 15% payroll tax barrier to low-skill labor and abolish the FOMC interest rate peg which subsidizes carry trade gamblers.
None of this will happen, of course. So the bubble finance narrative will roll on awhile longer. Indeed, having been house-trained on the Greenspan wealth effects doctrine, financial journalists like Crook are now taking the intellectual dead-end of state sponsored “demand” stimulus to an absurd and dangerous extreme. Namely, to an out-and-out case for anti-democratic governance by a Wall Street-beholden posse of central bankers.
The real objection is political not economic. Sending out checks is a hybrid of monetary and fiscal policy — public spending financed by pure money creation. That’s why it would work. Politically, this is awkward…….The real case for central-bank independence isn’t that monetary policy is non-political; it’s that central banks are better than politicians at economic policy.
There you have it. Start with the sheer Keynesian myth that there is deficient aggregate demand; spend a lifetime in the Wall Street/ Washington corridor drinking the Kool-Aid; and you end up not knowing the difference between Berry Pickers and Money Printers.
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Mine's from the press and good fortune (bitcoin).
Wealth is but an illusion.
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
But the short answer is, it comes from the printing press.
As without it, you can work all you want, and not a cent will you gain in return.
On the other hand, wealth is power, and only certain people hold the power....
(It's all in the hands of the UK elite.)
the basic idea behind this ponzi scheme is that the money [debt] they create out of thin air has value due to their client state being able to tax its citizens labor.
In this case, the debt has become too large or the people's labor has been mortgaged too far into the future, however you want to look at it.
Either way it has already failed and is now being masked only by brute force CB open market operations and continuous global QE.
Dependson the work your doing. For yourself? You will reap the rewards. For someone else? Trade will come into play.
IMO,,,All work, even failures, will pay off.
The thing about Stockman is that he is right about a lot of things, but dead wrong about one of his core beliefs which is trickle down/supply side economics. A helicopter drop of money taken back from the .01% would actually have some positive effect on the economy. People would spend money into the economy that is otherwise sitting in bank vaults and being used to buy "art" for tens of millions of dollars, etc. The demand would cause a ramp up in production for goods and services, which would create jobs. It would need to be accompanied by trade laws that prevent those jobs from simply being created overseas. Neither is going to happen, and I agree with Stockman that printing money to give to people to spend would primarily just lead to inflation.
Money printing by it's nature, without wealth creation to back it up, or productivity increases, breaks the laws of physics that says you can't get something from nothing in general relativity worlds. The money printing is boosting asset prices like mad. It also has ticked off a great inflation in high end housing. New York for one example is producing massive high end town homes and apratments like crazy. Countless billions are spent trying to create the most expensive high rise apartments, or convert historic protected housing into palaces inside. Domestic and foreign money floods into the inflated real estate. Printed money goes to the elites who are first in line to get it at zero costs.
Stockman is a great diagnostic technician, he really does know what's wrong. But like you say, he falls down on the trickle down theory. It seems everyone wants to short change the workers and still expect THEM to be centers of demand. Wealth at the top and downward pressure on the middle and bottom is the result of Stockman's solutions. Henery Ford was much more correct when he realized his workers were his customers and so were all other workers. A decent wage does not drag business into the gutter, it creates demand for their products. But we all know labor is screwed, due to mass over supply, thus the bidding war to the bottom just can't be overcome. So, no solution is in sight.
Money printing by it's nature, without wealth creation to back it up, or productivity increases, breaks the laws of physics that says you can't get something from nothing in general relativity worlds.
Seems more complex than this to me. There have been massive productivity/ efficiency increases in the past 30 years but biproduct has been less reliance on humans and a greater amount of economic pie going to the few people who really matter re: technology & capital.
In other words, economy is still based on a well-outdated supply + demand model where people still need stuff - but most are no longer integral to the economy. Can't sell clothes / food / oil to robots and software so need to find another way to keep the system going. The proposed solution being to give people money instead of having them earn it with a wink wink nudge nudge the system is still working the same as it always has.
At some point i figure everyone will be forced to admit the system has fundamentally changed. Not that many people in the mainstream tend to agree with me though.
Agree James Cole, Productivity in the most productive nation on earth is way up over 40 years.
I think Adding Value to the Economy is a different way to looking at this in many blogs.
But maybe we need something more radical in how we think of money, how the money is define and created. I just say that since we are losing value to the owners of Capital. If the Wealthy don't need anything but slaves, unskilled labor, then it is like the government is the only one that needs us.
Unfinished thoughts here. Being a devils advocate.
Labor Supply is very High, so Labor Rates Fall.
If printing fucking money worked, we'd all be speaking latin. Nobody would be poor and none of us would actually have to work. What part of your liberal dementia is it going to take for you to come to grips w/ that?
You once again exposed your great intelligence by disagreeing with the exact opposite of what I said.
Me: "I agree with Stockman that printing money to give to people to spend would primarily just lead to inflation."
You: "If printing fucking money worked, we'd all be speaking latin.... What part of your liberal dementia is it going to take for you to come to grips w/ that?"
Speaking of dementia, I suggest you up your dose of Namenda or whatever other medication would help you learn to read.
There you go again, twisting words and playing both hands. You said "TAKING MONEY FROM THE .01%". Well, please, go ahead a clarify then. Should we do it with teh economic benefits as you suggest, or will it lead to inflation as you mention at the end. Your posts are like a Greenspan or Bernanke diatribe. You know exactly what the outcome is, but you want to sound so sophisticated that you get off trying to mind fuck everyone.
I said the .01%, not the 1%.
Printing money creates inflation by definition. Taking existing money from the .01% who stole it and giving it back to the population would cause some inflation in goods and services when demand rose, but it would also reduce inflation in other things (e.g., stock prices, fine art, high end housing), and most importantly it would create good paying jobs so long as accompanied by trade laws that prevented the .01% from building factories in slave labor countries. As local production met increased demand, it would be a win-win. Inflation would be checked by a ramp up in production to meet demand, and wages would rise. Or we could continue the current system of offshoring and printing money and feeding demand with debt.
Raise your private army and go get it champ.
That is why we have to create new value in the Economy.
New projects, new Industry, New Value Added to Streets, Bridges, Highways, Sewers, Damns, longer lasting energy sources at lower costs of maintenance or pollution, Buildings at will Endure 200 years, maybe better city planning with more efficient transportation routes, small cities that realize efficiencies through transportation instead of charging $10 a day in parking...
People go back to the Interstate Highway Project, Utility Projects, Apollo Project, Citizen Conservation Corps that built or expanded the utility of our State and National parks...
Putting money into the most expensive buildings in the world or most expensive roads in the world is foolish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis-Bacon-Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Bacon_Act
An Inventive approach to Spending Federal Government Money to fix things and start new projects is needed.
No Need to Higher the most Expensive Labor in the Nation to Fix and Build things. Get rid of Davis Bacon Act if that is holding us back. Get an Industry Expert and have him hire a team for a government project.
Hell you can even do that will pulling back expensive IT Contracts for the Federal Government (Expensive Privatization). There is no Reason the Federal Government has millions of Expensive Contracts. If you had to wait a year for a contract from the Government and deal with the Auditing, Accounting, Regulations... you would charge top rate for your services too probably.
Stockman probably knows this.
Maybe there is a dispute about Taking Public Utilities in the USA and making them private like Tennessee Valley Authority (Who is now back on Federal Budget costing $50 Billion a year, nice privatization, huh?) Or a dispute in creating public utilities on government money.
National Security is looking at certain things as stores of value for Crisis & War. War Reserves. Utilities were accepted in the Depression Era. Money as a utility should be accepted in the Great Recession Era.
"That is why we have to..."
Take that royal 'we' and...whoops, I'm filling the troll trough, aren't I?
I just woke up. Did I say we some where?
Yeah Spelling Nazi type or troll.
The Royals are the ones in Charge don't forget that (You don't forget it). Bow to the one who rules you slave.
Take some time and try to write a little. You'll learn a lot. I'm sure we would all benefit from new ideas.
Trade laws?
*Mercantilism intensifies *
Trade restrictions are for paleocons and unions.
Yes...strange bedfellows, indeed.
I understand we actually have a book of trade laws despite the meme that we have free trade.
Why just last week:
Both the Senate & House are working on new Trade laws identical.
one for trade with Africa & Haiti, something to do with Duties.
One is for Property Rights from what I can tell.
And a third is another about duties and tariffs on bulk cargo imported to the USA in either solid, liquid, or gas state.
This would be the ultimate stock repurchase plan in history, buying back shares(citizens) in the United States Corporation.... why didn't they think of it sooner?
S/
We are what we produce not what we spend.
Indeed. The elephant in the room is offshoring. Once we started offshoring our manufacturing jobs, we started an inexorable decline in the standard of living for the middle class. The Fed and TBTF banks created credit bubbles in the '80's and '90's to hide the effects of this, but the gutting of our economy is coming home to roost. Fixing the problem would require a complete overhaul in international trade. But no one in power is trying to fix the problem. They are making it worse, papering it over in the short-term, and setting up a police state to deal with the inevitable consequences.
our wealth?? if your wealth cometh - you need to save this date:
The Bilderberg Group will coalesce June 9-14th in the Austrian Mountains at the Interalpen Hotel.I still say the most money created is through the Wall Street TBTF Banks using small amounts of assets to create money out of thin air for Derivatives.
There is $1 Quadrillion in Derivatives out there according to time magazine. Sure some are going to lapse and be recreated as short term instruments. Some are Swaps not in play till a default. Some are more like Insurance. But it totally unregulated or nearly so.
Who says Credit has to be based on Assets or GDP or Wealth Created? Look at the Data. Private Banks are largely Self-Regulatory Organizations (SROs). Just like the Stock Markets.
I don't see the Audit from the FED on how much money was created and the categories of where it was created. We can look at the Stress Index to get some idea, but we can't conclude anything. Numbers matter.
Audit the FED to be illuminated with the Truth.
The Truth is the "FED" is a "Tower of Babble", constructed by Lawyers and Bankers to Confuse all the people. In the end our Tower of Babble, the FED, will cause such confusion there will be Rioting between the Classes, and the FED will be Destroyed.
The down trodden will then have to wander off to create new languages.
A Tower of Babble.
Bank Private Credit to GDP for United States
2011: 55.47615 Percent (Data spans from 1961 to 2011, Bubble is clear in 2003)
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/DDDI01USA156NWDB
Private Credit by Deposit Money Banks and Other Financial Institutions to GDP for United States, 2011: 189.51640 Percent,
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/DDDI12USA156NWDB
I honestly don't think the helicopter drop would be the end of the world. It is insane, just as insane as all the rest. But it'll be used to pay down debt and the outcome will disappoint proponents regardless. It's a one-time cash infusion and won't help you on car or house payments. No one will go ape-shit with it. Don't forget, Bush basically did this. That money wasn't really there. And the outcome was weak.
This is when you then get other stupid shit like the Japanse raising the income tax a year ahead to get you to spend the money they give you.
Right but how big would the check be? Wasn't Bush 2 checks like $600 bucks? People will pay off the excesses they already have created with credit cards. Really, how much would go into growing the demand? Look what happened when gas went down. People saved. With all the retirees coming on line and nearly broke what are they gonna do with it? Not spend I say. They will pay down debt and save.
Breaking News. Off Topic: From today's Daily Mail of London "
One of Barack Obama's most senior advisers has told how the president said to him: 'I'm the closest thing to a Jew that has ever say in this office.'
David Axelrod, one of the key figures in Obama's rise to the presidency and his first term in office, revealed the claim
Now this should surprise nobody! The zionist grip on Washington is absolute. The USA is a functional lacky for a foreign country. Now it is confirmed at the highest levels. Just as Hillary Clinton ensured her family joined the religion of the rulers, Obama himself may be next.That real estate guy, Shiffman, Shillman, or maybe Shiller, and th fed guy Hilsenrath i think, get th media time to say just close your eyes and spend 'cause everythings great and thats all you gotta do. Its kinda funny because we're all supposed to be exceptional and you would think that would mean intellectually to go along with any physical skills we had. Since we all go to higher education these days (which I thought was for opening your eyes) it seems weird that the polarization principle is to just shut up and spend. I just don't understand the dichotomy. Something's wrong
David: The real issue is the excess "money" creation from unchecked growth of phantom fractional reserve debt claims that cannot be serviced via cash flows because private fractional reserve banking is a control fraud whereby a few families and TBTJ banks collect all the seigniorage and the public bears the inflation/loss of purchasing power. It necessarily concentrates financial "wealth" and control into the hands of a few, which creates bottom up debt service problems and a ultimately a risk of cascading default.
I wouldn't be a fan of QE for the people, but the reality is that it is restitution for the banking/financial sector theft via "money" creation (why should private individuals/institutions get the prerogative of seigniorage rather than the public coffers?)
Time to call it the control fraud of TBTJ fractional reserve banking that IS the root cause of our problems.
If money is the root of all evil, what is the root of all money?
The LOVE of money is the root of all evil.
FIFY.
For decades, American workers and countries around the world have been forced to use the FRN as compensation for labor and capital. Enforced literally at the end of a gun. The Fed became a true monopoly when the dollar was oficially established as the global reserve currency at Bretton Woods. Since then, the western global banking system has become increasingly corrupt (and increasingly agrssive in enforcement). The new BRICS system has enough muscle behind it to challenge the Fed monopoly. I'm anxious to see how things pan out. Interesting times.....
Things to think about;
If technology has made life better, then how is it so that some things are cheaper ie... tvs, electronics, but they don't last as long and they are obsolete after a few years ie. older apple tv can no longer view youtube videos. so buy another and it will be obsolete in a coouple of years as well. So the big corps keep us as debt slaves chasing a newer system.
years ago a middle class family could afford real wood furniture. today it is out of reach to most people. But back then people were not taxed at nearly 50%. So it goes like this, you work four times as many hrs to be able to have the money you need to buy the furniture, because the furniture maker has to charge twice as much because he has to give half to the .gov in taxes as well so the item costs 4 times what it should and the more entities that touch the manufactured item, the price/ taxes keep climbing!
With all of this modern tech we should be working 3 days a week and having a more productive family life, instead we are more in debt than ever in history, the family is broken, the gov has taxed us to death and spends it all on interest payments because they are broke, meanwhile we have carrear politicians that are just leeches of society and take away our freedoms and a very few people own the earth and we are slaves to them.
well done mankind. our future is more of the same.
I wish our future is more of the same.
It is getting worst by the day.
I think he has many good points. Many fail him because of the trickle down theory... With all the out sourcing, in sourcing and off shoring production that is still ongoing,,, I don't think the trickle down theory or for that matter any other theory would have had much of a chance.
The game is simple.
(1) China has taken a lot of American dollars , say X trillions
(2) In order to dilute China's wealth , if 2X trillion dollars are printed , then China's wealth becomes X/3X => 1/3
This way America is indirectly taking money back to itself.
You are using the arguments of the bogus economist being promoted and given nobel prize.
Wealth cannot be reduced by printing money. Wealth may seem reduced if people have a lot of money and price of products increase. Do you see prices increasing for Chinese?
Prices in america are indeed increasing. but Chinese are not afected by that. A few chinese do buy expensive American assets. but the main asset holder China Government has been decreasng its purchase of American assets and moving to Gold and direct investment in third world to acquire more industrial assets.
China has changed many Governments quietly without much fanfare. And Americans still do not realize the extend of Chinese activities. Probably because NSA is busy snooping on US citizens.
I like money though
Money is debt. Every time, we print money we are creating debt.
If A buys from B with $100 note. And then B buys from C with that $100. and C buys from D with $100, the total debt is still $100.
That final $100 owed to D must be settled by A.
If A is a normal person, and D is Government, A gets to be bankrupt.
But if A is Government and D is a normal citizen, then what is happening now in USA will happen.
when robots sit idling because consumers have no money the ben's helicopter can indeed kick start the economy
When banks lend, they CREATE new purchasing power ("loans create deposits"). When those loans are repaid that purchasing power is DESTROYED plus the interest is transferred to those with a lower propensity to spend it.
So yes, helicopter money can prevent the destruction of wealth (eg. idle workers and plant) when the counterfeiting (banking) cartel has exhausted the population's capacity for new debt.
I'll add that some new money creation is necessary for growth else risk-free money hoarding is rewarded. But progress requires taking risk (eg. investment), not hoarding money.