by Mark Thornton
Mises.org
Legendary investor Bill Gross calls on the Fed to bring about Friedman’s “helicopter money.” The idea of helicopter money was introduced by Chicago school economist Milton Friedman in 1969. The idea was to be able to fight deflation, although ironically the US was then on the precipice of a decade of harmful inflation.
Gross doesn’t want real helicopter money with dollar bills being dumped out of helicopters into the hands of average Americans. He also does not want realistic helicopter money, where the US Treasury prints up dollars and spends them into the economy. This would be too obvious to citizens and the impact would be higher prices, rather than on interest rates.
He wants the Fed and other central banks to buy trillions of dollars of government bonds. Of course this would be to the benefit of bond mutual fund directors, like Gross.