[JumpCrisscross]

> If the money created by the FED is just a meaningless number

Money supply is not a meaningless number. The sum of money supply and the national debt is a meaningless number.

It would be like taking my checking account balance and adding it to the amount of cash JPMorgan Chase has on its balance sheet. Independently, they're meaningful figures. And one is related to the other. But the sum doesn't do anything useful.

> why don't they finance the government directly and the USA would avoid to pay bond interests?

This is called running the printing presses. Wherever it has been tried, historically, rampant inflation follows. The independence of the Fed is to ensure rate-making (and money supply) decisions, which have broader economic implications than the U.S. government's interest costs, are made apolitically. (That said, the Federal Reserve is the largest buyer of U.S. Treasuries and remits its profits to the Treasury.)

[RobertoG]

>>"This is called running the printing presses. Wherever it has been tried, historically, rampant inflation follows."

My understanding is that most of the cases of hyperinflation (Germany Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe..) were due to problems in the real economy, not to the printing of new money.

Anyway, it seems that, related to inflation, the important thing is the money that is spend in the economy in the current period, not the public debt (the money that has already been spent).

A big public debt doesn't mean inflation, as the case of Japan (or the USA) show. Public debt an inflation are two very uncorrelated variables.