My understanding may be very imperfect, but anyway...
QE money goes from thin air of one form or another to the banks, who are then supposed to loan the money wisely to people who qualify for the loans. The thin air is actually all of the people since the existing money is diluted by the new money printed. Since not everyone has the same amount of savings, the very rich people are inflation-taxed quantitatively more than the poor people.
helicopter (H) money goes from thin air of one form or another directly to all people, equally. The thin air is actually all of the people since the existing money is diluted by the new money printed. Since not everyone has the same amount of savings, the very rich people are inflation-taxed quantitatively more than the very poor people.
If all else is equal (and all government plans to recover the money printed somehow go awry as they usually do), then from the perspective of anti-banksters, H money is better than QE money, because the money goes directly to the people instead of passing through a (corrupt) banking filter. From the perspective of least-governs-best advocates, the same is true.
Yet another perspective is the classic economic perspective that without more manufacturing, no real wealth is created by printing money. (However, I am no longer certain that that is true. the same might be said of a sudden gold asteroid shower hitting the earth. Would we still not be better with the added gold in everyone’s pockets? New demand is created. The new demand could in theory spur new manufacturing growth among those people in the population who desire to work harder to make more wealth from the people who would spend their sudden windfall to purchase goods.
Yet another perspective is the classic economic perspective that inflation is a cruelly regressive tax, because the poor are affected worse by inflation than the rich. (However, if the inflation surplus goes directly into H money, I am no longer certain of this.)
Is there H money in USA’s future??
IIRC, Taiwan has already done this on a one shot basis (and they seem to have survived).
It is our ex-Federal Reserve Chairman who is known as 'Helicopter Ben'.
Helicopter Ben is a coined name for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. The origin of this "nickname" stems from statements made by the Chairman in regards to a hypothetical monetary crisis. He basically indicated that if there were a liquidity squeeze, he would direct helicopters to be flown around the country spewing out fistfuls of cash to the populous.
Don't worry about a recession, Helicopter Ben will save us.
by Guido1 March 03, 2008