Direct foreign-exchange market interventions* in the early 2000s would have been highly stimulative (though not popular in foreign capitals).
Under such circumstances, government spending can be highly stimulative because it causes money that is sitting idle in bank reserves or savings accounts to circulate and become mobilized through consumption or investment.
The Making Work Pay tax credit benefited households earning up to $75,000 and was highly stimulative.
Howard Archer of IHS Global Insight said: "The Bank of England's decision to hold off from stimulative action was highly likely the result of a tightly split vote and we strongly suspect that the MPC will act in the second quarter and very possibly as soon as April".
"There's little doubt that what the government is doing right now [with its stimulative policies] is highly inflationary," says Zell. "It's pretty hard to imagine that interest rates are not going up in the next couple of years, and probably materially".
And all the tax cutting going on is clearly meant to have some stimulative effect, although how much is highly debatable.
"I was highly, highly offended.
There is no money for an extension of the highly stimulative jobs emergency fund which funded jobs for poor people struggling to find work through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families federal program.
Abe has fired the first three arrows of his "Abenomics" recovery policy — modest fiscal spending, highly stimulative monetary policy and structural reforms that still are mostly on paper.
He was given two options: he could demand that Congress remove a seventy-billion-dollar tax provision that was worthless as a stimulus but was important to the House leadership, or he could cut sixty billion dollars of highly stimulative spending.
