The buy a house, get a visa program which I have been pushing for some time is getting some serious play.  Writing in the WSJ, Richard Lefrak and Gary Shilling note:

The blueprint for a program to sell surplus housing to immigrants is already in place with the EB-5 visa program. Each year, 10,000 EB-5 visas for this country are available for foreigners who each invest $1 million in a new enterprise ($500,000 in economically depressed areas) that creates at least 10 full-time jobs. After two years, the entrepreneur and his family can become permanent residents.

It's about time.  Shows how peculiar it is to define a liquidity trap in terms of short-term rates.  The fact that the Fed usually buys short-term bonds is a minor issue as far as monetary theory is concerned, like the fact that the Fed usually prints $1 bills but not $2 bills.

• Everything you want to know about smart grids from the very smart Lynne Kiesling.

• "In the hubbub surrounding President Obama’s
  decision to cap salaries of commercial-bank CEOs at $500,000 (if they
  receive future federal funds), the salaries of college and university
  presidents have been flying under the radar."  Clarence Deitsch and Norman Van Cott look at the President's club.

• Australians denied insurance for genetic reasons.  Clearly, a case for genetic insurance.

Here is the anecdote:

…sellers of safes said that business was up as customers confront new fears, be they losing money in failing banks or being robbed by desperate fellow New Yorkers. …”We’ve had customers come in who are putting half a million to a million dollars in cash in a safe in their home,” said Richard Krasilovsky, 58, of Empire Safe in Midtown…

Much of the debate over fiscal policy has occurred in Keynesian terms but its worth pointing out that it's perfectly reasonable to discuss fiscal policy in a monetarist framework.  Start with the quantity theory of money MV=PY, money times velocity equals prices times real output.

In the long run we know that real GDP is pinned down by real factors (labor, capital, technology, institutions and so forth) so increases in M will increase P proportionally.  But in the short run there are plenty of reasons to think that increases in M can increase Y – this is accepted by monetarists, Austrians, rational expectation theorists (ala Lucas) for unexpected changes in money, Keynesians and new Keynesians (only originalist RBC type theorists would object.)  But M and V enter the equation in an identical fashion and thus logically must have the same effects for the same change.  Thus if you think money is potent then V must be potent as well and V is fiscal policy.

To be precise, V is how fast money turns over and we can think about shocks to V as spending shocks.  Spending shocks can be driven by consumers or by the government – this is what Brad DeLong means when he says "the government, in this respect, is just like any other group of starry-eyed optimists whose eagerness to spend pulls the economy into a high-employment, high-pressure boom."

One way of understanding the current recession is that V has fallen by a lot and it is dragging down Y (just as would a sharp fall in M).  We can counter with an increase in M (monetary policy) or by an increase in V (fiscal policy).

Now we might think that V driven by government is too slow or too wasteful (ala Kevin Murphy (pdf)) to work well or we might think that neither increases in V nor increases in M would be as effective as Keynesians imagine since there is also reverse causality (falls in Y and expectations of slower growth in Y are reducing M and V).  We could pursue the last point to its fullest and abandon the quantity theory altogether (making V an endogenous function of Y, for example, and removing it as an independent variable).  But if we hew to the basic ideas of the quantity theory–and remember, it's not a true model only a way of looking at the world!–then fiscal policy is not impossible.