Denmark's Jyske Bank lowers its negative rates on deposits

You can always point to numbers that are supposedly good (such as questionable government-issued employment statistics) and I can always point to numbers that are bad (the PMI, the Russell 2000, the unprecedented levels of sovereign and individual debt).

If the economy really was that great now for people on main street, why is Trump losing approval among the people that voted for him to fix this exact issue?

> Governments can borrow money to build infrastructure that make people's lives better, I don't know how you can dispute that this policy option exists or say that it "doesn't work that way" when you know, governments do that stuff all the time. When in doubt, and you have low interest rates, build a sewage treatment plant!

I'm not against emergency measures by any means, but the tendency with governments is to make the emergency measure of today the status quo of tomorrow. This idea that you can spend yourself wealthy at the national level is just as flawed as the idea of trickle-down-economics.

Sure, in the short term, debt-financed government programs can stimulate the economy, but that debt has to be paid off. You have moved demand from the future into the present. It will be missing from the future, because money spent on debt service cannot be spent on anything else. That is unless you don't pay off the debt, or you erase it through inflation, in which case that is still money missing from someone's pocket, and it's not just foreign pockets - most US debt is internal. It's also not going to be the rich guys' pockets, because they saw it all coming and bought up all the hard assets already.

Yes, technological advances have improved life and have allowed economic growth.

No. Society as it is currently could not have been financed by those things alone. Massive loans that cannot and will not ever be paid back cannot exist without an inflationary economy (powered by fiat currency with no limit to currency supply and fractional reserve banking). And those types of loans and the inflationary economy have been crucial for the US/The West to attain and maintain their world domination politically, economically and militarily. That's where the term "military industrial complex" comes from.

Nixon moved away from the gold standard for a reason: the US was unable to afford its wars (Vietnam at the time) and keep its military happy and in check without an inflationary economy.

Inflationary economy = massive free buying power out of thin air for whoever controls the world currency, until they control the world currency no more and an empire falls.

Again: I'm no expert at all, this is just my limited understanding.

You're right. Deflation is not always a bad thing. But runaway deflation is. And runaway deflation is especially likely when there is no increased productivity (like their was in the period you mention) combined with massive debts (which didn't exist in the period you mention, because there was not fractional reserve banking like we have now and value of currencies where intrinsically backed by scarcity of gold).

A little deflation shouldn't be bad for a healthy economy with "sound money", but as you describe yourself: that's not what we're working with here.

It's not just governments who have massive amounts of debt. It's also large businesses and most real estate owners. The middle class should definitely not embrace deflation right now, because deflation could very quickly spiral into runaway deflation.

Runaway deflation = lower wages, lower housing prices, less government budget (less absolute taxes coming in). Less government budget = greater inequality, worse educational quality, leading to decrease in productivity, more crime, more corruption, more waste of resources and aside from government issues: less investments by companies, lower stock market prices, insufficient pension fund reserves due to investments going down (= lower pensions), people losing their house (lower wage = some people can't afford payments on house credit and are foreclosed), housing prices going down more because of foreclosures and bad economy, people increasingly start selling their house at an increasing loss, housing prices go down further, more people start losing and so on.

End result: Japan. Or perhaps worse: the 1930's crash (a prime example of runaway deflation), subsequent poverty, social unrest and wars.

I feel this is not a great explanation though, perhaps someone else can do better.