There is reason to believe low-interest rate policy has lowered productivity, lessened economic growth, and favored large firms at the expense of small firms and innovation. Greater inequality and stagnating wealth has resulted.
Natural constraints on firm size are numerous, and in a truly free market, large firms would be constantly prone to being broken up and put out of business by competition. And all to often, huge firms become more long-lived due to government intervention.
Some people get richer faster than other people. But what really matters is increasing access to everyday necessities (and luxuries) for everyone.
Government policy encourages homeless people to congregate in public areas twice over: first, cities destroy access to very-low-cost housing. Second, city governments often refuse to enforce their own rules of public-space use. Tent cities result.
To borrow a line from Al Gore, this strikes me as a “risky scheme.”
Creative design of statistics cannot solve the persistent crisis. The core of the problem lies in a misguided economic policy that zombifies the Japanese economy and thus undermines prosperity.
The gold price is heading up at the moment, but we can still learn a lot from three big collapses in the gold price which occurred after 1934.
The ECB isn't stopping with government bonds. It will end the current monetary experiment with widespread intervention in corporate debt and all aspects of the market, further destroying what freedom still exists in debt markets.
Money supply growth inched up in May, rising slightly above March's and April's growth levels. But overall growth levels remain quite low compared to growth rates experienced from 2009 to 2016. March's growth rate, for examples, was at a 12-year (145-month) low.
In the Soviet Union, any significant goods had two price tags: one real and another virtual. One was the actual black-market price. The other was the "official" government price.
