The Life Cycle of Money

72 points16 comments9 hours ago
pocksuppet

> Contrary to popular belief, governments do not "print money" to spend

This part is wrong. In the US scenario, the government either issues bonds (creating money) or it moves its reserves at the central bank, bringing money into circulation. Money outside of circulation effectively doesn't exist, so this effectively creates money.

Money relationships between two parts of the same entity should not be counted as money. Otherwise I can become a trillionaire by lending myself a trillion.

The deficit-surplus identity seems to only hold if the federal reserve is considered part of the government.

> The Fed’s balance sheet expands. It has more assets and more liabilities. This is not "printing money" in the colloquial sense; it is creating electronic reserve accounts that banks can use for lending or other purposes.

Except you just said money is a relationship on balance sheets. Larger balance sheet = more money. Perhaps the dispute is over the word "printing", since creating money doesn't involve a printer.

I like the section about money moving. Those of us in the cryptocurrency ecosystem see the clear parallels. When Bitcoin is used to pay for something priced in Ethereum, the bitcoins don't leave the Bitcoin network - they end up at a trader who releases the same value of ethers on the Ethereum network.

7777777phil

One thing worth adding: the repo market underneath all of this is roughly $12.6 trillion in daily exposures, about $700B larger than previous estimates.

Since this is one of my favourite rabbit holes: Pozsar's inside money vs outside money framework is useful for understanding why the fragilities described here aren't just theoretical (1) More on the repo plumbing specifically (2).

(1) https://philippdubach.com/posts/pozsars-bretton-woods-iii-th...

(2) https://philippdubach.com/posts/repo-might-be-even-bigger-th...

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0sdi

I find Richard Werner's take on money one of the most grounded. He has done a lot of work to track how it moves in the pipes. He has done a lot of communication around the subject, that one can find easily. The same guy that is said to have invented QE.

DevelopingElk

This is written by an LLM account. My guess is this article was created with some human guidance too, but the profile shows LLM patterns.

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skybrian

Not an expert, but amazingly this all looks correct?

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kelseyfrog

The article is adamant that "this is not printing money," and then gives very technical explanations that are honestly difficult to untangle.

My question is, what would a "printing money" look like, hypothetically? I feel like comparing the real to the hypothetical would help me understand the difference by highlighting the contrast.

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solarity_studio

Without reading it, this is written by ai

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