France pulls last gold held in US

That's not what's happening currently. Inflation has driven up prices to the point where people can't afford to spend. They're forced to cut back on spending just to keep a roof over their head and food on the table. Inflation promises that things are cheaper now than they ever will be, but that just means that anything you can't afford you either have to go without or take an even bigger hit to your wallet after trying to save money at a rate faster than prices are increasing. That sort of thing leads to less spending.

Credit cards were the solution for many Americans for a very long time, but that was never sustainable and now the US has record amounts of household debt and homelessness.

Deflation makes things more affordable and so people buy more. Yes, they could horde all their wealth, but you can't eat money and it isn't much fun. When times are good why would anyone bother going without when they can easily get what they want today. Consumerism is strong enough to keep people buying things. Decreasing prices gives consumers confidence that they can make risky purchases and investments.

But yes, sophisticated investors do make money on under utilized land. Parasitically.

And it is an economy damper. Under utilized land is poor economic optimization by definition. Not to mention the undertow it creates, in terms of unproductive scarcity, for people who actually need to utilize land - whether that is for homes or businesses.

The solution, as economist Henry George pointed out, is to tax land, but not the property on it. Tax the exlcusionalry holding of a limited resource, don't tax productive value created by people.

Taxing land and not property isn't as simple as taxing both, but it isn't rocket science either. There are lots of standards and practices, because distinguishing between the two is important for many reasons.

The irony of taxing property, the stuff that makes land productive, is that it is a wealth tax that hurts rich and poor alike. A poor person, unemployed, who spends their time bereft of reliable income improving their own home will now be taxed on the value added - every year for the rest of their lives or until they sell or lose their home. That is a very perverse situation.

So yes, the taxation situation that subsidizes under utilized property, which is also parasitically rewarded by gains in value far exceeding the lower taxes they pay (for having no development to tax), is continually damaging the economy.

Bitcoin has the same problem. There is no inherent reason you can't have a cryptocurrency where there is no maximum number of coins to ever be mined and instead the limit is that mining them requires a fixed amount of computation.

That would give you the characteristics you want from a medium of exchange, because there is a rate limit on how much can be created (doing so requires e.g. electricity). Then the value is relatively stable, if you accept it as payment on Monday it would still be worth around the same amount on Friday, but the long-term result is a slow reduction in value on multi-year timescales as compute gets cheaper, so you don't get the speculation that results in high volatility and it doesn't strongly compete with real economic activity for investment resources.

The argument you'll get from goldbugs and whatever is that nobody would want a currency which is inherently inflationary like that, but that's clearly contrary to evidence. Most government currencies are inflationary, even on purpose, and it doesn't matter as long as the rate of inflation isn't so high that people holding it transiently for use as a medium of exchange are losing a significant amount in that short period of time. Especially when the rate of inflation is predictable (the rate at which computers get faster is reasonably consistent) so that anyone entering into a long-term contract denominated in that currency can reasonably predict its future value on the delivery date. Or people could just use it as a medium of exchange and denominate their contracts in something else.

The problem with zero interest rate is that it doesn't incentivize better ideas. Why would you work to increase productivity if capital has no cost?

The period 2016-2021 was one where interest rates were the lowest, sometimes even negative, and you saw companies hiring endlessly, and acquiring competitors with no intention of doing anything their their products.

It is very hard to compete on talent and good ideas in such an environment when your all competitors are burning through loaned and venture capital (which itself is also largely loaned at some point).