Looked Good on Paper

On the surface, there was an elemental logic to it: Flood the financial markets with needed liquidity by making trillions of dollars in asset purchases, which would provide plenty of capital for job creators to lend at low interest rates, which consumers could then borrow to buy stuff, which would increase aggregate demand to the point where job creators would start hiring people to make the stuff that consumers wanted. Unemployment comes down, profits go up, tax revenues get raised, problem solved. It didn't work, of course, because (1) the job creators decided to keep the money for themselves, and (2) policymakers had no idea at the time how bad the recession really was---and still is! They---and we---would have been a lot better off if they'd given the money to our elected leaders to provide jobs to all the people who needed one, but our elected leaders weren't terribly interested in creating make-work programs---unless they involved spying on people. This pretty much sums up the era we live in.

---Baron V