The whole concept of “just printing money” is SUPER outdated anyway in a world where the vast majority of money is digital and the size of some of the largest hoards have no significant relation to the availability of physical currency.
I think this is lost on a lot of people. You used to have to physically store assets or money in order to have that money. You no longer need to. This breaking of money from physicality has second and third order effects that Keynes and Friedman just weren’t equipped to understand. Credit in large organizations or wealthy families approaches digitalization but it’s not actually the same thing as 90% of the country holding their money in digital accounts that can be fractionally leveraged by the banks.
At the end of the day we need new big theories on the behavior of digital economies. MMT is a step in the right direction but we need more. Especially work on systems of distribution. We’re effectively in a post scarcity world but we insist on a distribution of basic goods that creates scarcity.
My sister works for the wealth management software fintech company Addepar that Peter Thiel founded as a quality control engineer :| this is a sentiment she has echoed. Specifically that we live in a post scarcity world, but governments/society have not caught up to that.
Alright, think about this for a minute. We produce enough food to feed everyone on the planet. But even without war or closed borders there are countries where people go hungry. Purely for economic reasons.
There’s enough housing in the US to house all of the homeless. But we don’t want to support rural areas so people have to move away. And we treat housing as an investment activity so instead of building to need, developers build to market. That means there will never be enough in the large metro markets because if there was, they would lose money.
I can go on. The idea that capitalism is the most efficient system of distributing goods is fatally flawed.
Which makes it even easier for a government to create and spend it :)
Or a bank. Or a billionaire. Or a hedge fund. Or a stock market maximizing algorithm.
My point is that the amount of money in existence is no longer centralized or anywhere near as relevant as how it’s accumulated and ESPECIALLY how both it and tangible resources are distributed.
Gandhi figured out that “there is enough in this world to satisfy every man’s need, but not enough for every man’s greed” over half a century ago when ACTUAL scarcity was much more widespread and the rich were many times more constricted by laws and regulations than now.
Mentioning “Printing money”, even metaphorically, is nothing but a distraction from the things that actually matter and make a difference one way or the other.
Or a bank. Or a billionaire. Or a hedge fund. Or a stock market maximizing algorithm.
Only government has full control over its national currency via central bank and taxes. It’s not decentralized, as every commercial bank needs to get a loan from the central bank, and people have to pay taxes in national currency.
As other have mentioned, we operate with Fractional Reserve Lending, so most Money is not created by governments but by banks when the lend money.
Here is an article from the Bank Of England on it in case you think this is bullshit.
Government control over money creation is, nowadays, mostly indirect via reserve criteria which is a lot softer that the direct control over money printing in the old days.
Your idea of how money is created is at least 30 years out of date.
The whole concept of “just printing money” is SUPER outdated anyway in a world where the vast majority of money is digital and the size of some of the largest hoards have no significant relation to the availability of physical currency.
I think this is lost on a lot of people. You used to have to physically store assets or money in order to have that money. You no longer need to. This breaking of money from physicality has second and third order effects that Keynes and Friedman just weren’t equipped to understand. Credit in large organizations or wealthy families approaches digitalization but it’s not actually the same thing as 90% of the country holding their money in digital accounts that can be fractionally leveraged by the banks.
At the end of the day we need new big theories on the behavior of digital economies. MMT is a step in the right direction but we need more. Especially work on systems of distribution. We’re effectively in a post scarcity world but we insist on a distribution of basic goods that creates scarcity.
My sister works for the wealth management software fintech company Addepar that Peter Thiel founded as a quality control engineer :| this is a sentiment she has echoed. Specifically that we live in a post scarcity world, but governments/society have not caught up to that.
We must have different definitions of “scarcity”.
Alright, think about this for a minute. We produce enough food to feed everyone on the planet. But even without war or closed borders there are countries where people go hungry. Purely for economic reasons.
There’s enough housing in the US to house all of the homeless. But we don’t want to support rural areas so people have to move away. And we treat housing as an investment activity so instead of building to need, developers build to market. That means there will never be enough in the large metro markets because if there was, they would lose money.
I can go on. The idea that capitalism is the most efficient system of distributing goods is fatally flawed.
“Printing money” is a metaphor, of course most money now is just virtual numbers.
Which makes it even easier for a government to create and spend it :)
Or a bank. Or a billionaire. Or a hedge fund. Or a stock market maximizing algorithm.
My point is that the amount of money in existence is no longer centralized or anywhere near as relevant as how it’s accumulated and ESPECIALLY how both it and tangible resources are distributed.
Gandhi figured out that “there is enough in this world to satisfy every man’s need, but not enough for every man’s greed” over half a century ago when ACTUAL scarcity was much more widespread and the rich were many times more constricted by laws and regulations than now.
Mentioning “Printing money”, even metaphorically, is nothing but a distraction from the things that actually matter and make a difference one way or the other.
Only government has full control over its national currency via central bank and taxes. It’s not decentralized, as every commercial bank needs to get a loan from the central bank, and people have to pay taxes in national currency.
You can’t be serious 🤦
As other have mentioned, we operate with Fractional Reserve Lending, so most Money is not created by governments but by banks when the lend money.
Here is an article from the Bank Of England on it in case you think this is bullshit.
Government control over money creation is, nowadays, mostly indirect via reserve criteria which is a lot softer that the direct control over money printing in the old days.
Your idea of how money is created is at least 30 years out of date.
Also true. Only MB money aggregate is in active circulation.