Low interests rate are indeed preventing investment. Althought capital is readily available for borrowing, as the article says companies already have cash on hand as it is. Higher returns are needed to boost investment. Why do you think so many funds and banks are exploring developing nations. Higher returns.
Low interest rates are preventing investment by people who have money, sure. But in theory they do stimulate investment in new plants and equipment. If I can borrow money for almost nothing I can build a factory to make products that are barely profitable.
But the OP is right. Free money encourages waste. It encourages companies and governments to build things they can't really justify and can't afford to maintain. The real monument to Japan's lost decades is the amusement parks, golf courses, and rail lines that are crumbling because there was never enough demand to support them.
Indeed. A positive inflation (and a stimulus policy) make by themselves a case for waste. A negative inflation might favor resources conservation, or at least a better management.
It's a complicated topic - there was a great discussion about the inflation tax in a bitcoin article recently - http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4621674 where I was exposed to interesting new ideas by enki and snikto:
using up resources is not valuable by itself. forcing someone to spend on anything, anything at all, does not lead to a good allocation of resources. it might increase GDP, but it does not create value.
under inflationary interpretations of value creation, building a road circling back onto itself - not connected to anything - in the middle of a desert that no one ever visits - increases GDP and thus helps the economy. the better if you afterwards tear it up and rebuild it a second time.
on the other hand, in a stable currency system, if someone holds on to their capital, they actually free up resources for those who do spend. this means the purchasing power of those who do spend goes up.
in such a system money flows away from those who spend on things that have no return (consumption), and towards those who create (value creation by seizing and creating opportunities).
Maybe when comes the day where technology has not progressed enough to sustain economic growth and the extraction of resource should be rationalized (like say if we aren't mining asteroids in 100 years), there could be a case for a negative inflation rate.
I don't think this doughnut road is something anyone advocates, nor does it translate to something like Q.E.
Inflation by itself does a great thing: it reduces the real value of old debt. Q.E. just distributes the cost of forgiving debt away from dead people to everyone in an economy. In other words, monetary policy lets us avoid the moral hazard of stealing from the past.
Regardless if it stimulates investment in capital assets, with higher returns companies are able to absorb higher interest rates. It gets deducted off their taxes either way. The rates have been low for too long.
