A fourth of all US dollars in existence were printed this year. How is the US economy able to resist any inflation at all?

submitted by casparvoneverecBig tiddy respecter from self.debatealtright

https://www.somagnews.com/9-trillion-story-22-of-us-dollars-printed-in-2020/

Look, I know that the money is in the stock market, money velocity and the US dollar is the reserve currency etc. But there has to be a limit certainly. What type to magic does the Fed have that they can print this amount of cash and never consequences?

or, are the stats lying? Libertarians have been crying for years that the official inflation figures are bogus. The plan is obviously to start to a global digital currency after crashing the dollar with mass inflation. But so far, no sign of inflation is in sight.

This year really made me hopeful at first. Maybe this time the great satan will finally capsize and its economy will fall. If the economy falls, then the US can slash its near invincible military forces and the global curse of Americanism would decline.

But so far, no inflation is anywhere in sight. Does the FED really have a magic tree that rains money?

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[–]Nombre27 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

This article by Greg Johnson has some interesting things to say about this.

Money does not need to have any intrinsic value. In fact, it helps if its intrinsic value is next to nothing, otherwise people will hoard it rather than circulate it freely, which would cause an economic hardship known as deflation, in which money is a commodity whose value rises because its supply diminishes. (When money is a commodity whose supply rises and its value decreases, that is called inflation. It is worth asking: Can one avoid both evils if money has no value in itself, i.e., if it is not a commodity that can be bought and sold alongside bricks and butter?)

If the best money has no intrinsic value, then the worst sort of money would be precious metals. The best sort of money would be entirely intangible, just data in a computer. Even paper money can be hoarded, for instance, when the price of toilet paper gets too high. (Perhaps the best way to ensure that money is not hoarded is simply to print an expiration date on it.)

Not sure of the consequences of any of his suggestions but it was an interesting read and perspective. It seems that the problem today is we're stuck in a monetary system like a human centipede with you-know-who first in the line. Whoever gets the money first gets to take advantage of it's full value before changes hands enough times to get to the rest of the population. With the amount of government subsidies and purchases, in-group networking/exchange, etc., it makes you wonder just how much of the trillions in the US monetary supply that the average actually has access to. If the people towards the front of the line only pass that new money supply around amongst themselves, then there's essentially more than one economy within the country. One for the plebeians that fund the patricians and then one that the patricians keep for themselves.

If the US government, or any government for that matter, is capable of printing/borrowing money without any consequences (inflation/hyperinflation) and give it to special interest groups, why shouldn't that be to the benefit of stakeholders, the ones paying the taxes.

[–]Jacinda 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

If the US government, or any government for that matter, is capable of printing/borrowing money without any consequences (inflation/hyperinflation) and give it to special interest groups, why shouldn't that be to the benefit of stakeholders, the ones paying the taxes.

Of course but that would mean transforming the banking system. Germany tried something like that in the 1930s.

Here's a modern proposal from the UK

Edit: I stumbled across this while searching the Internet. It's a suggestion by an Australian economist to sidestep the banks and feed the money needed to sustain the economy directly through peoples' accounts.

Given that how better off a country would be, I am surprised that someone, somewhere, isn't attempting to do this.

After all the financialisation of the economy creates a lot of action for the people at the top and not much for everybody else.

Edit: Michael Hudson (Unz archive) has been writing about the essentially parasitic nature of the FIRE economy (finance insurance and real estate) for years. Here is one such article.

Unz:

The problem is that as people owe more and more debt service, they have less and less to spend on goods and services and so they’re not able to buy what they produce, and so employment shrinks and the economy shrinks [while the FIRE sector grows].

[Snip...]

But finance is not the economy, the stock market, the bond market, and the wealth market. Basically you can think of it as the finance insurance and real estate sector. The FIRE sector is external to the economy. It’s something else. It’s the economy of the 1%. [Cont...]

[–]Nombre27 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Thanks for all these links, I'll go through them.

Hudson also has an article on Unz about a debt jubilee.

https://www.unz.com/mhudson/debt-jubilee/

After all the financialisation of the economy creates a lot of action for the people at the top and not much for everybody else.

It gives the appearance of work being done but since it seems to be mostly about manipulating numbers on paper/computer, very little of it ever tangibly manifests.

[–]Jacinda 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I often fantasize about making an attempt to study economics. Reading one of Michael Hudson's books would be a good start; so much of the orthodox thinking seems to be more akin to religious dogma (perpetual growth), or bad faith arguments (inflation is good) designed to benefit a certain class.

Recently Keith Woods gave a talk about capitalism (which he calls investorism); its need for perpetual growth, and how this in turn leads inextricably to globalism, open borders, and environmental degradation — a result of investors / capitalists chasing down returns to pay down ever increasing debt

He doesn't propose any solutions but it shows how deep rooted the problem is and how, without a reform of our financial system, any nationalist movement is doomed to failure.

[–]EthnocratArcheofuturist 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Because it's pumped into Wall Street, not the real economy.

[–]Jesus 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

True, the care packages given to the common person are merely a tax that will be mortgaged to your children.

The INFLATION will come; they might blame it on Trump in January. The crisis will hit in 2021. WEF has made this clear and the IMf and Christine Lagarde has covertly spoken of the law of 7 in numerology. From the time she made that speech, the 7 year ends in 2021. They want to collapse the economy for the 4IR. Covid was just the dry run.

[–]Jacinda 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Precisely, it's inflating asset prices but as long as it is held by relatively few people (who will be massively enriched in the process) it doesn't really effect the real economy.

It's simpler to think of it as (yet another) handout to the banks and also to the one percent.