Answer:
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Governments have the capacity to make broad changes to monetary and fiscal policy, including raising or lowering interest rates, which has a huge impact on business.
They can boost the currency, which temporarily lifts corporate profits and share prices, but ultimately lowers values and spikes interest rates.
Governments can intervene when companies or entire segments of the economy are failing, or threatening to undermine the whole economic system, by providing bailouts.
Governments can create subsidies, taxing the public and giving the money to an industry, or tariffs, adding taxes to foreign products to lift prices and make domestic products more appealing.
Higher taxes, fees, and greater regulations can stymie businesses or entire industries.
Monetary Policy: The Printing Press
Of all the weapons in the government's arsenal, monetary policy is by far the most powerful. Unfortunately, it is also the most imprecise. True, the government can do some fine control with tax policy to move capital between investments by granting favorable tax status (municipal government bonds have benefited from this). On the whole, however, governments tend to go for large, sweeping changes by altering the monetary landscape.
Currency Inflation
Governments are the only entities that can legally create their respective currencies. When they can get away with it, governments always want to inflate the currency. Why? Because it provides a short-term economic boost as companies charge more for their products; it also reduces the value of the government bonds issued in the inflated currency and owned by investors.
Inflated money feels good for a while, especially for investors who see corporate profits and share prices shooting up, but the long-term impact is an erosion of value across the board. Savings are worthless, punishing savers and bond buyers. For debtors, this is good news because they now have to pay less value to retire their debts—again, hurting the people who bought bank bonds based on those debts. This makes borrowing more attractive, but interest rates soon shoot up to take away that attraction.
Fiscal Policy: Interest Rates
Interest rates are another popular weapon, even though they are often used to counteract inflation. This is because they can spur the economy separately from inflation. Dropping interest rates via the Federal Reserve—as opposed to raising them—encourages companies and individuals to borrow more and buy more. Unfortunately, this leads to asset bubbles where, unlike the gradual erosion of inflation, huge amounts of capital are destroyed, which brings us neatly to the next way the government can influence the market.
Bailouts
After the financial crisis from 2008-2010, it is no secret that the U.S. government is willing to bail out industries that have gotten themselves into trouble. This fact was known even before the crisis. The savings and loan crisis of 19891 was eerily similar to the bank bailout of 2008, but the government even has a history of saving non-financial companies like Chrysler (1980),2 Penn Central Railroad (1970)3 , and Lockheed (1971).4 Unlike the direct investment under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP),5 these bailouts came in the form of loan guarantees.
Bailouts can skew the market by changing the rules to allow poorly run companies to survive. Often, these bailouts can hurt shareholders of the rescued company or the company's lenders. In normal market conditions, these firms would go out of business and see their assets sold to more efficient firms to pay creditors and, if possible, shareholders. Fortunately, the government only uses its ability to protect the most systemically essential industries like banks, insurers, airlines, and car manufacturers.
Subsidies and Tariffs
Subsidies and tariffs are essentially the same things from the perspective of the taxpayer. In the case of a subsidy, the government taxes the general public and gives the money to a chosen industry to make it more profitable. In the case of a tariff, the government applies taxes to foreign products to make them more expensive, allowing the domestic suppliers to charge more for their products. Both of these actions have a direct impact on the market.
