Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Manuel_D 998 days ago
> What I mean is that the US government is mostly in debt to itself, in money it can print.

Because if it did just print money to service the debt, the value of the dollar would drop due to more USD in circulation. Remember when a load of money was added to circulation during COVID, and then a year later inflation reached the highest levels in half a century [1], until the supply started to drop? That was $2.2 trillion USD. Imagine the inflation $33 trillion would bring.

1. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m2

https://i.imgur.com/Gpht5iv.png screen grab since there's no way to link to the 25-year duration.