You mentioned the issue of cash and other short-term financial assets not being mobilized within the business community. I do think that is an important problem. Think of the economy as having four major players in it, if you like, who have to be spending, and in general borrowing and spending, in order to propel the economy forward and create jobs: consumers, government, foreigners—in the sense of our net exports—and then the business community.
Consumers and governments have both gone deeply into debt during the recession, and are concerned about the debt and are looking at curtailing their expenses. Our net exports to the rest of the world have declined significantly, partly because of economic weakness in the rest of the world, partly because of our overvalued exchange rate.
That means we're very dependent right now on business opening the taps of capital spending in order to balance out our recovery. As yet that hasn't really happened. In fact, business investment spending is still the only source of domestic spending in our economy that is lower in real terms than it was before the recession.
So I'm in favour of measures to try to stimulate more investment spending, both by businesses and by the public sector, and there are very important investment infrastructure programs that the government can and should be taking on in part to address the downturn in employment that I documented.