I don't want to argue. I'd be happy to discuss these matters further so long as the conversation remains rational, and you avoid attempting to put words in my mouth and quote me directly in context.
I wrote this:
"When the Treasury does not have enough in its accounts to cover its checks, the Central bank covers them by crediting the Treasury's reserve account. This is the "printing step", and it is the only printing step. The Treasury can only spend in, and the Central bank can only print in, the amount of deficits authorized by Congress. Therefore the Central Bank Does Not Determine How Much New Money Gets Printed! (vide infra) This amount gets determined indirectly by Congress when it decides how much to tax and how much to spend. Only Congress can do this."
Most of us would interpret "amount" in the quoted paragraph to mean the nominal amount, as in number of dollars or currency units; not the value or purchasing power of the dollars.
It is the Congress, and not the Federal Reserve, that determines the total number of units of outside money in the global economy. What the Federal Reserve does do, via monetary policy, is affect the purchasing power of each unit. The Fed's hands are completely tied, however, when it comes to the total number of units of outside money created. Creation of units of outside money is precisely what is meant by the term "printing". "Printing" is the figurative expression for the creation of new outside money. The term, "Printing", never, correctly, refers to inside money.
I heard Ben Bernanke once refer to the swapping at market prices of Bank Reserves for Treasuries, i.e., QE, as "printing." This is, in my opinion, an incorrect use of the term "printing", because the dollars the Fed was depositing in reserve accounts as a part of the QE transaction had, in effect, already been "printed" when the Fed covered a previous overdraft due to Congress having created a deficit. Bernanke did this in response to a media question. I think if he had had more time to think about his answer, he might have answered differently. On the other hand, I understand his need to "keep it simple."
In my view, there is only one true "printing" step, and that occurs when the Central Bank covers a net, fiscal-year Treasury overdraft -- there are alternatives to the ways this can be accounted for on the books of the Treasury and Federal Reserve, but they are all equivalent.
You wrote: "The federal reserve bank is tasked with either expanding or shrinking the current balance."
Were you attempting to attribute this to me? If so, it's a misstatement of anything I wrote.
One will not be able to understand much of what I post unless one has a grasp of the concepts of inside and outside money, which I believe may be due to Minsky, but on this I could be mistaken. [see Minsky's scholarly criticism of Keynes in "John Maynard Keynes", Pg. 49, by Hyman P. Minsky; also see "Why Minsky Matters", by L. Randall Wray].
I attempted to explain the difference between outside and inside money in my response to you. but it may not have been enough. One must not confuse the outside money Congress causes to be created via deficit spending with the temporary, inside money created within the economy, often referred to as "credit". The number of units of inside money created is, indeed, influenced by both Federal Reserve Monetary policy and the state of the economy. It is mainly inside money that economists are referring to when they use the broad term "money supply".
Fed policy does affect the purchasing power, especially versus other currencies, of both inside and outside money. The Fed can not, however, affect how many units of outside money are present in the economy. That is to say, as I have emphasized before, the Fed does not get to determine how much, i.e., how many units, of new outside money will be "printed". That is a power given only to Congress. Yes, the Fed "prints" this outside money, but only so much as Congress indirectly authorizes. The Fed does have control over how the outside money in the economy is distributed between Bank reserves and Treasuries.
Undoubtedly the hardest thing to accept is that there is no national debt, because we are all raised on endless political harangues over our trillions of dollars of "national debt" saddled on future generations that we will never be able to pay off. The truth is that when the Treasury auctions securities it is exchanging bank reserves for an interest paying store of money in the form of Treasuries. Recognition of this is the single most important contribution made to our understanding of strong sovereignty, fiat money by the "modern money economists."
The U.S. is not borrowing so much as a penny! Since the U.S. dollar is the World's reserve currency, there is a tremendous demand for Treasuries. Our Central Bank also needs them as a tool for carrying out Monetary policy. Treasury's auctions of securities look so much like borrowing can there be any wonder that nearly everyone believes that the U.S. is borrowing money to spend.
Unfortunately, our national misunderstanding of U.S. Treasuries has become so ingrained in us that their true roles, and the true reasons we auction them in amounts matching our deficits, could only be accepted by some if they were to make their own, detailed study of transactions among the Treasury, Central Bank, and Private Sector. But who except a few have both the time and inclination for this!*
You may be one who is simply unable to grasp the true nature of Treasury-Central Bank-Economy interactions without doing your own detailed study, which you have not the time for. This would be unfortunate only for you, as you will be doomed to accepting the politico-media version, as most others do. The Economics of money and banking is moving on without you.
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*I confess. I had both the time and the inclination (I am retired), and I had the personal guidance of a Rutgers-Harvard trained Ph.D. Economist to correct me whenever I strayed off course.
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