Markk wrote:We can Data Dive all you want....This one just shows inflation, year by year for each president going back to Ike, the presidents of my life time.
I'm sorry Markk, but you explicitly said "money printing" -- we are not just data diving, but concept diving. What is the link between money and inflation? YOU are the one who brought up money printing. Now you're trying to change the subject, "ignore what I just said" -- you're now saying "erase the M2 line on the graphs Gad posted and just show inflation line". Which is also saying, "forget about what I said about money printing and just show the inflation, because I didn't realize I was shooting myself in the foot."
Money printing in the context I wrote "foot on the pedal," is simply spending money we don't have, and having to back it with bought monies (interest). This devalues the dollar, and prices rise while "our" net income can't keep up with it. It is not rocket science.
If only it were
merely rocket science. That's quite a gloss-over explanation, but I'll keep it to one question: If our income "can't keep up" then why would inflation persist? If we don't have enough money to continue to buy things, wouldn't the price of things fall?
In business we kind of do this all the time, and it hurts company growth. The company I work for does a lot of government work, and very often it takes months to get paid (tyically 90 days or more), so we have to borrow monies against a line of credit (3% over prime, which is very good) to meet payroll (over 150 employees) and bills.
If I understand what you're saying, you're saying lets assume the government paid you immediately. If that were so, then you wouldn't need to borrow money. Borrowing money "hurts company growth" but fortunately, you have a low interest rate and so it isn't that bad.
Low interest rates enable company growth -- it also enables inflation. If borrowing money hurts company growth, you'll need to explain that to Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, and every other mega-corp that financed its way to world dominance via bonds and stocks.
Last year the US paid over 800 billion of interest on borrowed money.
What does that have to do with the money supply or inflation? The national debt and inflation are separate things. You can have a large national debt and low inflation.
Here's another interesting graph, since you worked in an entirely different subject:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/112 ... -timeline/
When the Fed buys government bonds it creates money, at the very least it creates money in the form of a credit to the seller's reserve account; whether that results in money entering the economy is a separate question. But looking at this graph you can see that the Fed added more than 2.5 trillion in assets during "Trump's watch," and over a trillion on "Biden's watch." But notice how the Fed sold off more assets than it bought during Biden's administration. See, "money printing" should refer to a case where the Fed just keeps buying bonds that the treasury issues (NOT directly in the US case), which could certainly be a concern, because it's essentially saying the bonds hold no real value. But if the Fed can find buyers, then its more like a real investment in the country. Biden went out clean. Now, how much is too much outstanding debt? That is another question and one nobody has a good answer to, but there is no number that magically translates to "inflation".
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