“For years, we lived in a world where there was basically zero risk premium on U.S. debt,” Jared Bernstein, the former head of Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, told me.
“In four short months, Team Trump has squandered that advantage.”
“For years, we lived in a world where there was basically zero risk premium on U.S. debt,” Jared Bernstein, the former head of Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, told me.
“In four short months, Team Trump has squandered that advantage.”
When you print money, it devalues all the existing money because there’s more of it but the extra value it generates hasn’t materialised yet.
Guess who owns over half of all the money there is. Imagine how they would feel if you devalued it, and then imagine whose campaigns they would fund next time.
When you borrow money, you create a taxpayer liability that Americans have to work hard to repay, in addition to servicing the debt with interest payments.
Guess who neither pays taxes nor has to work harder to service federal debt. That’s right, and guess who funded your campaign. Are you going to let them down, or make the choice to screw workers a bit more?
Money doesn’t have value. Money is just a medium of exchange. It can be anything, a pebble, a shell, a small piece of metal, a piece of paper, or, most commonly today, digits in a computer. Things are what have value. Consumer products and services, raw materials, etc. Money is just a stand-in for those things. Simply increasing the amount of digits in the computer isn’t going to suddenly increase prices. What would affect prices is if you transferred a bunch of that newly created money into everyone’s checking accounts, all at once. That would lead to inflation, because, as I already said, if you put money into people’s hands (or checking accounts) they’re going to spend it. This would increase the number of dollars pursuing goods and services, but the amount of goods and services wouldn’t increase right away, so there would be more money relative to the same number of things, and prices would go up. So, just don’t transfer all of the newly created money into people’s checking accounts.
Like I said, put some of it into an account that can only be used to pay bond holders. You know, the people the US Federal government owes all their money to. That money would trickle out of the Treasury department as the Treasury made payments to bond holders, it wouldn’t just be some big, sudden cash infusion into the broader economy. The same is true of using the money for Federal infrastructure projects.
I’m not suggesting the Federal government should default on its debt. Not at all. They should pay back bond holders, at interest. All except one: the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve doesn’t need to be paid back because they’re the ones who create the money, and they can manage the creation of the money so that it doesn’t lead to too high of inflation.