how would it put more dollars on the market than there was always going to be anyway?
Specifically printing money (as you proposed, or more realistically, the Fed giving more money to the US Treasury) means increasing the Dollar supply. Something kinda like that happens all the time and, in a much more controlled fashion, and is probably a net good. But, the Fed could just add $39 Trillion to the US Treasury’s bank account, it’s just a database update command anyway, and that would increase the Dollar supply by $39 Trillion. Sure, no actual bills would be created, that isn’t really important. At the scale those investments operate at, no one is handling cash, it’s just numbers in a database. But, it’s numbers in a database which are very carefully tracked and those numbers mean something to people. If I move $100 from the database at my bank to the database at your bank, you will have the ability to obtain more goods and services based on those database transactions. The whole thing is absolutely a house of cards, but it’s a house of cards that most people trust because if anyone fucks with that house of cards the US Government will show up and start shooting them. People also trust it because the US Government (US Fed, really. But that’s a whole different can of worms) is very careful about how it grows the money supply.
If the US Fed started just adding large amounts of money to the US Treasury’s account, people would notice and people would freak out.
The total Federal debt is $39 trillion, but there’s only something like $20 trillion actually in existence, if I’m not mistaken. Even if we collected every single existing dollar out there through taxes, we’d still have a shortfall of almost $20 trillion.
Wikipedia puts the number in actual bills and coins around $2T. But ya, the number of physical Dollars is dwarfed by the US debt. And no one cares. Most money exists as numbers in databases. But, those digital Dollars are every bit as real as the physical ones in the sense that they can be used to obtain goods and services.
Specifically printing money (as you proposed, or more realistically, the Fed giving more money to the US Treasury) means increasing the Dollar supply. Something kinda like that happens all the time and, in a much more controlled fashion, and is probably a net good. But, the Fed could just add $39 Trillion to the US Treasury’s bank account, it’s just a database update command anyway, and that would increase the Dollar supply by $39 Trillion. Sure, no actual bills would be created, that isn’t really important. At the scale those investments operate at, no one is handling cash, it’s just numbers in a database. But, it’s numbers in a database which are very carefully tracked and those numbers mean something to people. If I move $100 from the database at my bank to the database at your bank, you will have the ability to obtain more goods and services based on those database transactions. The whole thing is absolutely a house of cards, but it’s a house of cards that most people trust because if anyone fucks with that house of cards the US Government will show up and start shooting them. People also trust it because the US Government (US Fed, really. But that’s a whole different can of worms) is very careful about how it grows the money supply.
If the US Fed started just adding large amounts of money to the US Treasury’s account, people would notice and people would freak out.
Wikipedia puts the number in actual bills and coins around $2T. But ya, the number of physical Dollars is dwarfed by the US debt. And no one cares. Most money exists as numbers in databases. But, those digital Dollars are every bit as real as the physical ones in the sense that they can be used to obtain goods and services.