wasn't quanatative easing done for like a decade after tbe recession with no inflation? why is there any reason to think this time around will be different? scale?
We don't see shopping cart inflation because it's countered by the technological cheapening of the production. And the key fact that new money is not being given to people buying groceries.
I'd see the problem if it worked how I've sometimes seen it described, where rich people and banks are just getting free gifts of cash, but that's not accurate.
The job of financing ventures should be done by private parties and the banking industry, not by government, but since they are too preoccupied chasing assets with cheap money they can't be bothered to.
Congress could give the Fed the power to, rather than just buy bonds (or whatever it is they do) introduce money to the economy simply by giving everyone money.
I understand that it is not exactly true that the rich are getting free money for nothing. But the whole reason we're talking about this here is that someone pointed out that all the new money supply from the Fed is finding its way straight to people and corporations that don't have anything better to do with it than buy assets, the prices of which continue to grow as a result, even while the GDP rate is plummeting.
Lastly, I'm totally open to the idea that someone will come along and explain to me why my idea for how the Fed should give everyone money is just not workable. If that happens, I'll be happy to have learned something useful. But it's definitely not clear to me, a priori, why it wouldn't work if it wouldn't.
Congress has this power, and can always use it. The fed doesn't have this power, and that's because a bunch of unelected bankers aren't supposed to be making political decisions about wealth distribution.
Read up on the difference between fiscal stimulus and monetary stimulus...it's impossible to have an intelligent discussion on this subject without knowing how those things differ.
Monetary stimulus is when the central bank increases the supply of money in the economy to control the value of a unit of currency as measured relative to units of goods and services, which in theory can have similar effects on people's spending behavior.
Either can be done with any degree of fairness or unfairness. And neither necessarily has to be done by the mechanisms through which the world's governments have historically tended to do them.
I agree that I don't want a few unelected central bank officials making decisions about wealth distribution. That doesn't mean that congress can't specify a different mechanism for them to introduce money into the economy.
Without sarcasm, given the latest purchases of assets beyond Treasuries and MBS, why do you think the Federal Reserve has purchased assets at market rates?
The Fed's activity is what drives the government's ability to pay it's contractors.
If you want to increase the money supply, print some money and give it out.
If you want to fund highway construction, figure out how much it will cost and then raise that amount of tax revenue to pay the builders.
Congress decides how the money is distributed when they're spending it.
It is easy to forget that the Fed's mission is to stabilize the value of money, not to conform to some concept of fairness. I would also point out that instability in the value of money disproportionately impacts the poor, who have the least savings available to deal with price shocks (if you are living paycheck to paycheck, then the price of bread suddenly doubling will leave you eating half as much bread).
As for taxes being "precise," that is an interesting claim. The US tax code is not even remotely precise, in fact it is hard to know what you are supposed to pay in taxes for the first paycheck of the year (your bracket could change unexpectedly). Our income taxes are progressive, but the wealthiest Americans pay little in income tax because their "true" income comes from their investments. We have the AMT which is meant to take care of that, but the AMT has not been properly adjusted for inflation and so a bunch of middle class families are stuck paying it, even though those families also pay income tax at a higher bracket than the wealthiest households that AMT was supposed to target. Then there are the countless things a person can get credits for -- children, particular kinds of business income, charitable giving, state and local taxes, etc. -- that result in people with the same income level paying wildly different taxes from their peers. Investment income is taxed, but losses can be carried forward, and some investments are taxed in a totally different way, some can also be carried backward (see Section 1256), etc.
On some level it is "precise," but in practice it is a mess that gets more difficult to work the more "established" you are in life (bought/sold a house? got married? have a new child in your life? finally made enough to contribute to a retirement account? get ready to do a bunch of paperwork to figure out what you are supposed to pay).
As for what the Fed is supposed to do, in practice, the Fed does much more than simply control the amount of money. The responsibility of the Fed is to control monetary policy and to maintain the health of the economy by doing so. Which is why they have such an important role, right now, in preventing the complete collapse of the US economy.
For things like stocks, if the increased value is driven by inflation, you get less for your money. So it takes more money to store the same amount of value there.
Isn't that basically what a REIT is? It's also possible to enter into joint ownership of a property. Roommates are also kind of like acquiring a fraction of a house.
Unless you rent, in which case you are acquiring a fraction of the liability without acquiring any house.