One of best known proposals for avoiding massive paper currency storage when nominal interest rates are negative is Silvio Gesell’s proposal for stamped currency. Although I think a crawling peg exchange rate between paper currency and electronic money (or what Robert Eisler, who initially proposed this plan, called bank money) is a much more convenient way to avoid massive paper currency storage, Silvio’s plan would get the job done of eliminating the zero lower bound. (See my own proposal in “How Subordinating Paper Money to Electronic Money Can End Recessions and End Inflation” and see “More on the History of Thought for Negative Nominal Interest Rates” and “Marvin Goodfriend on Electronic Money” together with its links.) In Chapter 23, Section VI of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes gives this account of Silvio Gesell’s proposal, which means that no one who has read The General Theory carefully has any excuse for talking about the zero lower bound as if it were a law of nature, rather than a policy choice:

Gesell was a successful German merchant in Buenos Aires who was led to the study of monetary problems by the crisis of the late ’eighties, which was especially violent in the Argentine, his first work, Die Reformation im Münzwesen als Brücke zum socialen Staat, being published in Buenos Aires in 1891. His fundamental ideas on money were published in Buenos Aires in the same year under the title Nervus rerum, and many books and pamphlets followed until he retired to Switzerland in 1906 as a man of some means, able to devote the last decades of his life to the two most delightful occupations open to those who do not have to earn their living, authorship and experimental farming.

The first section of his standard work was published in 1906 at Les Hauts Geneveys, Switzerland, under the title Die Verwirklichung des Rechtes auf dem vollen Arbeitsertrag, and the second section in 1911 at Berlin under the title Die neue Lehre vom Zins. The two together were published in Berlin and in Switzerland during the war (1916) and reached a sixth edition during his lifetime under the title Die natürliche Wirtschaftsordnung durch Freiland und Freigeld, the English version (translated by Mr. Philip Pye) being called The Natural Economic Order….

The incompleteness of [Silvio Gesell’s] theory is doubtless the explanation of his work having suffered neglect at the hands of the academic world. Nevertheless he had carried his theory far enough to lead him to a practical recommendation, which may carry with it the essence of what is needed, though it is not feasible in the form in which he proposed it. He argues that the growth of real capital is held back by the money-rate of interest, and that if this brake were removed the growth of real capital would be, in the modern world, so rapid that a zero money-rate of interest would probably be justified, not indeed forthwith, but within a comparatively short period of time. Thus the prime necessity is to reduce the money-rate of interest, and this, he pointed out, can be effected by causing money to incur carrying-costs just like other stocks of barren goods. This led him to the famous prescription of “stamped” money, with which his name is chiefly associated and which has received the blessing of Professor Irving Fisher. According to this proposal currency notes (though it would clearly need to apply as well to some forms at least of bank-money) would only retaintheir value by being stamped each month, like an insurance card, with stamps purchased at a post office. The cost of the stamps could, of course, be fixed at any appropriate figure. According to my theory it should be roughly equal to the excess of the money-rate of interest (apart from the stamps) over the marginal efficiency of capital corresponding to a rate of new investment compatible with full employment. The actual charge suggested by Gesell was 1 per mil. per month, equivalent to 5.4 per cent. per annum. This would be too high in existing conditions, but the correct figure, which would have to be changed from time to time, could only be reached by trial and error.

The idea behind stamped money is sound. It is, indeed, possible that means might be found to apply it in practice on a modest scale. But there are many difficulties which Gesell did not face. In particular, he was unaware that money was not unique in having a liquidity-premium attached to it, but differed only in degree from many other articles, deriving its importance from having a greater liquidity-premium than any other article. Thus if currency notes were to be deprived of their liquidity-premium by the stamping system, a long series of substitutes would step into their shoes — bank-money, debts at call, foreign money, jewellery and the precious metals generally, and so forth. As I have mentioned above, there have been times when it was probably the craving for the ownership of land, independently of its yield, which served to keep up the rate of interest; — though under Gesell’s system this possibility would have been eliminated by land nationalisation.