I see a LOT of opinion pieces that say that the government is printing money.
i have not however seen any actual official statistics . . .
so I looked them up.
Here are a few graphs that will help you understand exactly what is happening. first, let's compare purchasing power to money supply:
so you can see, roughly, that purchasing power of the dollar does go down with an increase in money circulation. this means that back when we could buy a candy bar for a nickle, there was less actual money in circulation back then.
So let's look to see if the money in circulation has increased lately, I'm using two graphs here because one might be misleading:
Make sure you look at the years at the bottom of those graphs okay?
So, now we know that *circulation* is increasing; if money were blood, this would be blood pressure. the pressure has build up and it's leaving less room for prices. Or, with more money in circulation each person has more money, but the number of goods being sold remain the same, to keep things balanced the price will rise.
But let's look at just one more thing, because "curculation" is a big word:
two graphs again, but they show the same thing. The big increase recently was in
reserve bank credit. You've heard of this, it's called
the fed rate.
The Fed rate is when the fed gov't loans money. Simple. except here's the thing: right now the fed rate is lower than inflation or banking interest rates. Uh? that means that if the bank can make as much money as inflation then it is making a
profit by
borrowing money. So the banks buy more credit, because it means they make more money.
If you don't understand that, suffice to say that the money being provided in the market is a loan to the banks-they will have to pay it back, but at a devalued rate (one that doesn't match inflation).
After the banks get it, in order to make money, they loan it out to you (the banks are not eligible for it unless they have started running out of money, so to make money this way they have to be more in debt than they are out of it).
Once the money gets to you, you spend it, you pay back the bank, they make money, they pay back the fed, the fed loses [normative]money. The banks make money at the expense of the tax payer, who loses money as both the customer and the . . . well the relationship between the fed and the tax payer is complex, but the fed "pays taxes", which could lower your taxes, but won't because it's losing normative dollars.
the fed, by printing money, which it loans at a loss to banks, is causing an increase in the supply of money, in the form of consumer debt, which causes inflation.
And to put all this into perspective, here's one more chart:
[this explanation may be distributed, please give credit to doctor100]