antiquary

Let's Just Say It: Print More Money

It's true that one of the causes of the minirecession from 1937 to 1938 was that they allowed the money supply to contract, but this doesn't mean that the reverse is necessarily true today.

On the other hand, if you could know that printing more money would allow banks and individuals and so on to get out of their preexisting contracts by paying them off (at a discount, of course, in dollars that are worth less, but that has to be better than defaulting would be), so that they then could move on to loans and other contracts entered into based on today's economic reality, not yesterday's, then much of the stress on the system would evaporate. It would be like removing a single domino from the middle of a chain. Essentially, it would be like an evenly spread tax on all holders of dollars, to restore flexibility and fluidity. But how you could know that that move would have that effect, I don't know.