[lcw]

Obviously you are correct in that the Fed doesn't print money. That does seem like a misconception. However, they do make money more available by lowering interest rates and QE. This does give banks a disproportionate opportunity to lend more. Both because it's more lucrative for businesses and consumers to take on debt, but also because they need less real money on hand to do so.

While I agree it's not printing money out of thin air. It definitely seems to be making money more widely available, and in the end the outcome is the same. However, I think what you are alluding to is there isn't some chaos machine that dump money in the economy with no levers to pull it back.

[centralscam]

It's literally creating money out of thin air. The process is just obfuscated behind shell games and big words.

Anytime someone borrows money from a bank new money is created. It's supposedly not a problem because when the debt is paid back the money is destroyed again. In reality, though, debt is never paid back, especially by governments. Instead it's refinanced be taking on ever more debt. The amount of debt is only ever growing and so is the money supply.

[imtringued]

>It's literally creating money out of thin air. The process is just obfuscated behind shell games and big words

It is done that way to prevent out of control money printing. This process has stopped the concept of money printing since 1970 and it ensured there is less inflation. The central bank is doing its inflation fighting job right now. The difficulty of creating more money is being increased. At some point the deflationary forces of paying back money will arrive and inflation won't continue. It takes time.

>In reality, though, debt is never paid back, especially by governments. Instead it's refinanced be taking on ever more debt. The amount of debt is only ever growing and so is the money supply.

This is actually orthogonal to how money is created. The gold standard wasn't safe from a permanently expanding money supply even though digging gold is very expensive.

If you want to stop debt expansion you would need to read up on Silvio Gesell. Essentially the argument goes that money is both a medium of exchange and a store of value. Those two functions contradict each other. Saved money cannot be used to buy things. As a country becomes more prosperous the medium of exchange becomes scarce because people are saving and delaying consumption. There are still some people who have the need to transact and they need money. They could borrow money but that would make the debt problem worse because they would have to pay interest. They could issue more money but that would make the money supply problem worse. How is this supposed to be resolved? That saved money is like a blocked road, if a road is used as a parking lot, it cannot be used for its intended function, driving. We fine people for illegal parking and they will get their cars off the road and pay for private parking. What is a parking fee on money? It is effectively a negative interest rate or a demurrage fee. It encourages people to save in non money assets and give money to people who still have transaction needs.

This is completely orthogonal to what kind of money you have whether it has to be dug out, is printed by the government directly or you have a credit money system. All of them must have what amounts to a parking fee when debt is being paid off.

[imtringued]

Instead of printing like there is no tomorrow, call it deficit spending or the government massively overdrawing it's credit card.

Or just call it borrowing money because debt is the real problem.

Printing is rhetorical framing that people use to say the government is stealing from you through inflation.

The problem is that paying off debt cripples the economy because people aren't using money as a medium of exchange, they save in liquid money when they should be saving via CDs.