Even if households decided not to increase consumption but instead re-balanced their portfolios by using their extra cash to acquire real and financial assets, the resulting increase in asset values would lower the cost of capital and improve the balance sheet positions of potential borrowers. A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman's famous "helicopter drop" of money

      - Ben Bernanke, Deflation: Making Sure "It" Doesn't Happen Here, November 21, 2002

 Previously we showed that despite an unprecedented surge in developed world debt over the past decade, and especially in the last five years since the onset of the Great Financial Crisis (currently at 450% debt/GDP), there has been only a nominal increase in economic growth as measured by G7 GDP as well as CPI-measured inflation.