You lunatics think fiat is printed at will anyhow, so they'll just add a few zeros to the plates and keep the presses running longer, amirite?
Is it not?
I believe it is printed based on the ideas of Keynesian economics blended with a heaping dose of greed and just a pinch of rational thought and consideration for the future.
But if you want to get into a semantics game about what "at will" means and how it applies to the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury, I will resist the alluring waste of time.
Its printed because it has to be, because its the only way to keep things going. I think there is less malice behind QE than people might think. I believe that they are printing money because they have very little choice in the matter. I don't think *anyone* wants the dollar to fail, I'm just not sure that it can really be avoided. Running the presses has to happen so that the actual money supply can keep up with the electronic money that has been 'created' through interest payments, thats about as simple as it gets. Everything else is just complexity that masks that fundamental property of a system based on debt.
True.
I like to think of it in these simple terms.
2008 was the end of the recent credit bubble supercycle, the previous one ended with the great depression in the 1930's. The consumer cannot borrow any more money to support more lending and bidding up of asset prices. To prevent a deflationary spiral with collapse of global total credit the central banks were forced to make a choice.
They chose to maintain asset prices by slashing interest rates to near zero, taking all the private banks bad assets (mortgage backed securities) on their balance sheets in exchange for cash to bail out virtually every major trading house in the western world, and printing money and buying government deficits (maintaining ultra low rates and allowing governments to dramatically increase state expenditure during the great depression mark two).
Now I think this was actually a genius move. The money that the UK gov or US treasury owes the central banks, that extra 50% on the national debt will never be repaid, the bond payments are passed straight back to the government. Last time I checked the BOE owned over 30% of british bonds (gilts) LOL. True banana economics. Meanwhile negative real interest rates for 10 or 20 years will gradually weaken the currency (compounded) and allow the truly epic size of the credit mountain to slowly deflate relative to real world goods, effectively a soft devaluation of Western currencies.
This graph shows what the central banks need to keep from collapsing, and they are doing it by spewing money through government deficits into the real economy until credit can grow again.
All the while money velocity is falling.
So lambchop the answer is yes. Not hyperinflation certainly, but negative real interest rates are going precisely nowhere for a very long time.
I wouldn't give a shit but in the UK this policy has forged an unbreakable intergeneration wealth gap which never existed before.
Edit: couldn't get the fed or best graph links to work..this one isnt great but does demonstrate the run up in credit to 2008.