Faced with a slowing global economy, a number of observers – including former US Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke and Berkeley economist Brad DeLong – have argued that money-financed fiscal expansion should not be excluded from the policy toolkit. But talk of such “helicopter drops” of newly printed money has produced a strong counterattack, including from Michael Heise, the chief economist of Allianz, and Koichi Hamada, the chief economic adviser to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and one of the architects of Japan’s “Abenomics” economic-recovery program. I disagree with Heise and Hamada, but they rightly focus on the ... (full story)