The main problem now is we are going though... unforced personal austerity. None of the stimulus in the world is going to work, because what money people do get, they use to pay their debts or to save.
The average inflation rate is low....
HOWEVER, inflation for food gas and the like is sky high.
Why? They're needs... well and the global food crisis.
What needs to happen in my opinion, is people getting used to the economy, all the debt to get cleared out people go bankrupt, and then people finally being relaxed and willing to spend. Essentially "Things aren't going to be like during the bubble when everything was golden and you seemingly couldn't lose." Then consumer spending will return.
All we may be doing now is delay that process while people spend more on food, rent and essentials while the supply of what's bought doesn't increase, meaning no worker increase. Eventually these people still may collapse to debt as well.
Preventing bankruptcies helps people. Merely delaying bankruptcies hurts people, because people who are forced to start over are now older.
Additionally, I'd guess, this means that stimulus money is just going to naturally settle to the top, as people pay off their debts, and such... not really leading to much increased investment at the moment, as people just sit and wait because there just isn't many situations where smart loans make sense.
Once everything does calm down and people get used to it... we may see a Post WW2 style boom. Or we may see a Carter era hyper inflation.
I'd bet on the second. If only because of WW2's unique factors.
If your high on the stimulus theory. It's important to note they didn't just increase the money supply. Government also just built private companies a ton of factories. It wasn't that they just increased demand artificially, they artificially increased production capabilities.... while bringing supply to zero.
As such, companies had a huge reason to keep more factories open then they would have normally. Due to having zero stock. Though production did slow, and slow and slow, and many factories were shuttered.
The downside though was it HUGELY increased our debt to GDP ratio. This was solved by explosive GDP growth, but it seems unlikely we'd have such a burst in us again.
