Pace Scott Sumner, suppose a country is stuck in a liquidity trap.  Conventional monetary policy is futile, and unconventional monetary policy isn’t working either.  What would happen if the government did the following?

Step 1: The Treasury refinances the entire national debt with perpetual bonds, better known as consols.  As you know, such bonds pay a fixed coupon every year, and never mature.  The coupon divided by the asset price equals the interest rate.

Step 2: The central bank uses standard open market operations to bid up the price of consols until nominal GDP starts rising at the desired rate.

Notice: With regular bonds, the difference between 1% interest and .1% interest seems trivial.  With consols, it’s massive.  A fall from 1% to .1% multiplies the sale price of a consol by a factor of ten!  There is an even bigger difference between a 1% interest rate and a .01% interest rate.  That multiplies the sale price a hundred-fold.  Can we really imagine that this massive increase in the public’s net worth won’t translate into higher consumption and investment?  And if not .01%, how about .00001%?

The only limit, as far as I can tell, is that the central bank might inadvertently retire its national debt.  When the bond price gets high enough, everyone sells.  But this seems like a remote possibility.  

If raising nominal GDP despite a liquidity trap is your goal, what’s wrong with this approach?