| Word on the street is fed "printing money" = "inflation like Venezuela." I've had these conversations dozens of times this year. I'm not extra smart, but somehow almost everybody misses your point about demand. There is also the matter of where the money the fed "prints" ends up. Its not handing out singles, they're using other instruments like buying paper. I'm not educated enough to recount exactly what the mechanisms are. If you allow me to contrive that essentially the fed is buying stock dips for example, the funds they are creating to do so doesn't end up as you mentioned buying loafs of bread and driving up demand, it ends up in the dragon's horde of large corporations and the beneficiaries of the windfall. So the ultra-wealthy, corporations, large institutional funds (Stanford?) and/or corporate stakeholders see their paper balances of stocks increase, and along with the fabulous credit that having lots of assets brings you, they are free to leverage these assets to consolidate other assets such as real estate, stocks (and buybacks), maybe (but probably not given the yeilds) bonds and maybe a yacht or three. Corporations, institutions, and ultra-wealthy wouldn't suddenly be able to afford to pay off their credit cards or buy extra calculators or yogurt, that is covered nicely in the first 100k/yr. The rest is fiefdoms and trust funds for generational transmission. Probably lobbyists too. Gotta add about 401k/retirement plans: That money is more or less a stipend for end-of-life, how much could that really balance the scale given the facts about the business cycle? |
Infact they're only buying paper.
The handouts are from the federal/state governments. The reserve has to buy the paper for the government to give out these handouts.