The welfare gains from adopting a zero nominal interest policy depend on the implementation details. Here I argue that implementing the Friedman rule by a government loan program may be better than implementing it by collecting taxes, even when lump sum taxes are possible. The government loan program will crowd out lending and borrowing and other money substitutes. Since money can be costlessly created the resources spent on creating money substitutes are a "social waste". Moving from an economy with strictly positive nominal interest rate to an economy with zero nominal interest rate will increase consumption by the amount of resources spent on lending and borrowing. But in general welfare will increase by more than that because consumption smoothing is better under zero nominal interest rate.
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Paper provided by Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University in its series Working Papers with number
0804.
Find related papers by JEL classification: E42 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Monetary Sytsems; Standards; Regimes; Government and the Monetary System E52 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Monetary Policy E51 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Money Supply; Credit; Money Multipliers E58 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Central Banks and Their Policies H20 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - General H21 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Efficiency; Optimal Taxation H26 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Tax Evasion
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