There is an old joke that goes: how many economists does it take to change a lightbulb? None. If the lightbulb needs changing, market forces will do it. We have given this idea its chance, for more than a century. We are still sitting in a dark room. Maybe all we need is one good electrician.
- The problem is by no means new. Thomas Edison summed it up very neatly in 1921: "[Henry Ford] thinks it is stupid, and so do I, that for the loan of $30m of their own money the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66m – that is what it amounts to, with interest … It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30m in bonds and not $30m in currency. Both are promises to pay; but one promise fattens the usurer, and the other helps the people."
A great quote. It seems the primary purpose of currency is to allow for the transaction of debt (I owe you this for that). It's the indirect creation of a ledger by controlling the ability to move values between cells. Perhaps this why the creation of currency is tied to the creation of new debt? The idea of buying a government bond is that the assumption of risk (and the opportunity lost in not employing the funds elsewhere) is what the government owes the buyer for the pleasure of using the purchaser's money, but when the point of selling the bond is to simply pay the purchaser interest, then can't we skip the steps in between? It seems we have reached that point.
Perhaps a better system is one where the supply is innately linked to the transaction volume; if the volume falls, the supply increases and vice versa. This could be done with a cryptocurrency, but I suspect that off-chain transactions would evolve in order to mask hoarding.