Ned Pepper's Outrages

Monday, July 11, 2011

Putting $$$ into the Economy the Easy Way

Moody's (whatever that is) reports that with the end of extended jobless benefits and various other giveaways, the jobless will lose about $37 billion this year, and it is feared that this will help kick the US economy back into 'recession' or even that other wonderful phrase "negative growth."
As usual, Ned is here to offer a common-sense solution to this problem: restore interest rates to where they were in 2007. What has happened since then has been the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars in income from holders of money market accounts, not to mention checking and savings accounts. Ned's friends may recall that, in 2007, money market funds were paying 4.8% interest, and now they are paying about 0.15%, which is so low as to be insulting. Let's assume that there are a trillion dollars in these MM accounts and checking and savings accounts, because Americans, with good reason, are too frightened to seek higher paying, but more risky, sources of income. If we were only getting the former 0.4% per month interest, that would mean at least 4 billion a month paid out to MM holders, and Ned suspects that much of that would be spent. Moreover, it would be taxed as income and not as capital gains, pouring more than a billion dollars a month into the coffers of governments, to support jobs and transfer payments like Social Security.
But, Ned hears some of his friends say, beginning to snivel and suck their thumbs, won't this hurt the housing market, and won't it hurt business and by inference, the Sneering Plutocrats who are its Captains of Industry?
Ned respectfully but indignantly rejects this claim, because "CEO" pay is already obscenely high, and business is sitting on more than a trillion dollars it isn't investing, and houses are simply too expensive: that is why the housing market is depressed, along with the fact that Americans don't have the wherewithal to buy them because their incomes have been slashed. And so we come back to the beginning: let's raise MM interest, and restore the Golden Age.
Ned wishes his friends a very good day.

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