Sound money

Loose monetary policy (artificially-low interest rates and QE/money-printing) has had a dreadful effect on incentives to save.

When governments claim that they can take care of people, and people believe them because they appear to be able to manage the economy to have perpetually-expanding nominal wealth, many people will see no reason to save for the future when the government will provide for them and will penalize them if they have savings.

And if interest rates are held artificially low because governments simply print whatever money is needed to fund the borrowing that can't be sold cheaply to investors, even those who want to save for the future will find it difficult to do so without gradually seeing their savings eaten away.

How can the solution to a period of excessive consumption and borrowing be to print money and manipulate interest rates to punish savers and encourage more consumption and borrowing? Only a mainstream economist or politician could believe that palpable delusion.

We would implement policies that prevented the government from printing and borrowing its way out of trouble at more prudent people's expense. We need to do this urgently, before the last few savers are driven by the punitive rates to speculate in the market, and the last of our capital is destroyed the next time (probably soon) that markets realise that the imbalances are unsustainable.