Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, my issue with the term "sloshing" is that it implies the money is floating around in liquid form ready to tick up inflation. It's not. There are a lot of places where this money has gone that are illiquid though. One would be American property; for most households a good chunk of their wealth is their house. In high-COL, high-property areas the main thing preventing a fall in house price is the lack of su…
Exactly all of this. A lot of people (myself included) are just kind of nervously waiting for the other shoe to drop. That the money exists but isn’t moving through the economy means that we’re essentially building more pressure in a system that is already at 0% interest rates. This should be concerning to everyone. The absence of velocity will encourage central banks to print more money in the belief that it will en…
You're not wrong, but it's a problem I'd "like" to have: too much economic activity. I'd rather worry about inflation and things running hot, with low unemployment (or high participation rate), than the opposite.
Remember late 2019, when the US unemployment rate was 3.5%?
* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
> The absence of velocity will encourage central banks to print more money in the belief that it will encourage spending when it clearly hasn’t done that.
When the central bank's rate is zero, they're flooding the market with liquidity, and bond yields are zero (or negative), then that's a signal for governments to open the taps:
> I would summarize the Keynesian view in terms of four points:
> 1. Economies sometimes produce much less than they could, and employ many fewer workers than they should, because there just isn’t enough spending. Such episodes can happen for a variety of reasons; the question is how to respond.
> 2. There are normally forces that tend to push the economy back toward full employment. But they work slowly; a hands-off policy toward depressed economies means accepting a long, unnecessary period of pain.
> 3. It is often possible to drastically shorten this period of pain and greatly reduce the human and financial losses by “printing money”, using the central bank’s power of currency creation to push interest rates down.
> 4. Sometimes, however, monetary policy loses its effectiveness, especially when rates are close to zero. In that case temporary deficit spending can provide a useful boost. And conversely, fiscal austerity in a depressed economy imposes large economic losses.
* https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/keynesianism-ex...
When rates are non-zero and bond yields are high(er), then it is dangerous to print money, and government spending could 'crowd out' private economic activity.