Coronavirus: raining the 100 euro banknotes by helicopter?

3/24/2020, 7:30:28 PM

DECRYPTION - When you are confined to your apartment, it is not a question of throwing money out of the windows but of bringing it in!

In exceptional situations, an extraordinary remedy. States and central banks multiply financial aid and credits through technically complex and indirect channels (we go through banks to support businesses), administratively complicated procedures. Wouldn't it be simpler than the central banks, these “lenders of last resort” as they are rightly called, distribute directly to businesses and individuals the money they create ex nihilo by turning the printing press ?

This solution had a name, " helicopter money ", and authorship went to Milton Friedman in 1969. The 1976 Nobel laureate in economics had found this formula to show that inflation depended on the quantity of money in circulation. And if by adventure it was felt that inflation was insufficient (this was not the case in 1969 but became so in the 2010s), it would be enough to make people rain "money by helicopter".