Quote from aradiel:
Everyone listen to scriabinop23, he is probably the only one on this thread that knows what he is talking about.
Just to add something to that subject:
Does anyone here (scriabinop23 I am sure you do) know what is wealth? Look, you have to know at leastr the answer to this question before blabling things like the fed should do this, inconstitutional tha,t and et cetera.
Is money wealth? Money just a proxy of wealth. Is gold wealth? No (not considering its industrial use for the sake of the econ example I am going to show). Gold is a proxy of wealth as well. What essentialy differentiates gold from money is the invulnerable scarcity of the first because no fed president or crazy dictator can "print" gold.
Let's say I find 1.000.000.000 tons of previously unknown gold in my yard. Would it make me rich? Yes. Would it make the world richer? No. If I start to put all this new "wealth" to use (i.e., go spend it all) I will end up causing a inflationary spike in gold terms in the economy (gold would lose a % of its value). In the bottom line, all my wealth would have been created at the expense of the other gold holders around the world - zero sum game, the world didnt got any richer. So no, gold is definetaly not wealth.
So what is wealth, and what phenomena increases wealth in the economy?
The answer is very simple. Wealth is any good or service that fullfills necessities of us, the human beings. And when we produce more of those goods and services (compared to, for example, last year), we create wealth in real terms. Goods and services, and only this, is wealth. So, the bottom line is money and gold are proxies, representatives of goods and services.
If you understand how this works, you will know that what causes inflation is not the money printing per se. What causes inflation is, in a simplistic explanation, a growth rate in money supply (via printing or debt, it doesnt matter) bigger than the rate of growth of supply of goods and services in the economy. So, lets say I am a dictator of a country that produced 10 bananas last year, and in this year it produced 20 bananas, I can double the money supply via money printing and not cause any inflation at all in the economy. Actually, I would have to do so if I dont want my country to enter in a deflationary stage. And oh, did I mention that if I raise the money supply 2 times more than the growth of bananas production via the "right way" - i.e.,debt, not "out of thin air" - it will cause big inflation in this economy anyway?
Do you get it now?
(btw, I may say I live in Brazil, so you probably will find this banana example funny, lol)
Of course, what I have just explained is a very simplified model, but it is the essence of moneys role in any capitalist economy. It is the pure basics, but I will admit most people (even economists) dont understand this concept at all.