“If central bankers are seriously trying to stimulate the economy with negative interest rates, they need to repeat the Wörgl experiment in full. They need to first get some new money into the economy, money that goes directly to the consumers and local businessmen who will spend it. This could be achieved in a number of ways: with a national dividend; or by using quantitative easing for infrastructure or low-interest loans to states; or by funding free tuition for higher education. Consumers will hit the malls when they have some new discretionary income to spend.”

Yes, or by combinations of those ideas including a debt jubilee….and if you also included a policy of a retail discount that was rebated back to merchants. There is both a scarcity of individual incomes and the system itself remains in/continues to be cost/price inflationary and so requires balancing/stabilizing. Finally, as the effects of inflation are only part of the overall cost components and size of the “gap” restricting the discount percentage to a paltry and very likely fudged and inaccurate CPI percentage is revealed as just another lingering orthodoxy, while the combination of the dividend and a larger percentage discount would aid in more completely freeing the individual and more quickly downsizing his/her need to borrow at all in order to have a satisfactory lifestyle….and of course that would tend to markedly downsize the market for Debt at the same time.