It is a good sign when one’s proposals are noticed, even if by someone who opposes them. Much of the video above is the standard set of ideas that sells gold and silver. In particular, in the video, Lynette Zang makes a prediction of very high inflation in the future that I think is quite unlikely. As far as modest inflation goes, Lynette neglects to note that moderate inflation tends to raise nominal wage growth. Another thing to note is that the erosion of principal that Lynette so laments as a consequence of possible future negative interest rates is the other side of debt relief for debtors—something the Bible has a different system for, but talks about as a good thing.

The welfare of debtors is important. It would be foolish to focus only on the unpleasant consequences of low interest rates for lenders and ignore the pleasant consequences for debtors. If we don’t say that “The Fed should never raise rates high to restrain inflation” because that would hurt debtors, we shouldn’t say that “The Fed should never cut rates below zero to restrain unemployment” because that would hurt lenders.

If you want to read Ruchir Agarwal’s and my papers “Breaking Through the Zero Lower Bound” and “Enabling Deep Negative Rates to Fight Recessions: A Guide,” take a look at my bilbiographic post “How and Why to Eliminate the Zero Lower Bound: A Reader’s Guide” which has those links and much, much more, including links to recent news about negative interest rates in a section that is down a ways.

On one point, I am in agreement with Lynette: I think the government should be producing gold and silver coins of defined weight that people could use as currency in a post-apocalyptic scenario. On that, see “Is Electronic Money the Mark of the Beast?” It is important however, that these gold and silver coins not be used as a unit of account or unit of price stickiness in our current non-apocalyptic or pre-apocalyptic situation, since that would mess up monetary policy quite badly, as the gold standard did for so many years in the bad old days.