Negative real yields and asymmetry

Going negative is hard for the economy, but we do it, much less efficiently than we do positive rates.  How do we go negative?

Forced mergers, bankruptcy, default and workout, expensive repurposing of buildings, expensive repackaging of excess inventory, corporate takeover, evaporative losses in  inventory (some stuff does get trashed), dissolution of labor unions, government restructuring and expensive political battles, labor migration, sometimes war, downgrades of labor value.

Even customer return of defective products is a negative flow, but this we are efficient at it.  So, in standard negative production, like customer returns, we over fund the department as an expense of other departments, a utility.  Then the customer return department can do the negative about a positive bias, it looks like positive production.

So we  do the negative. We are simply very inefficient at it.  And we know this, we actually plan conservatively so we spend most of our time with positive yields.  Planning against negative yields forces the economy to work about an equilibrium, keeping inventories magically up above negative inventory.

But long term smoothness means these equilibriums have to be broken now and then and rebuilt as technology changes the shape of production networks. Mathematically this is true, smoothness requires the ability to make short reversals and take different options.

Combine negative yields with positive efficiencies of scale and we get Recalculations, maybe they should be called Requantizations.