Office Economics and ‘Quantitative Easing’
I just read a brilliant little essay here in Medium, “The Great Office Coffee Famine,” by Joseph Dragovich. [odd that it just came to my ‘in-box’, given that it was published August 13 of last year]
In the essay Mr. Dragovich describes how the place where he works ran out of pods to make coffee. He goes on to draw analogous lessons in economics from that event.
In doing that Mr. Dragovich made mention of central banks’ response to the onset of the Great Recession, as follows: “I’ve heard people compare the coffee famine to the quantitative easing that took place just after the Great Recession. To stabilize coffee consumption, management needed to inject lots of currency (in this case coffee) into the system. Because they were slow to act they ended up having to add more coffee than they would have had they acted quicker.”
In a Response I suggested that it would be a better fit with quantitative easing if the original hoarders had been given huge supplies of pods, which they could, if they chose, distribute among their fellow office-workers using the debt-based system they had already established.