Predictably, the depths of the present economic crisis, including the remarkable flattening of interest rates since it began, have led to several calls by economists, including Jordi Gali and the Mercatus Institute's David Beckworth, for the Fed and other central banks to ready their money choppers for…
This morning, upon logging in to my Twitter account, I found it brimming with reports that the Hong Kong government was about to embark upon an unprecedented experiment with helicopter money. "Helicopter Money is Here," blurts an FT Alphaville headline. "Hong Kong Embraces Helicopter Money," says Zero…
"Helicopter money" started out as, and long remained, nothing more than a heuristic device — and a brazenly counterfactual one at that — employed by monetary economists as a means for gaining a better theoretical understanding of the consequences of changes in the stock of money. "Suppose,"…