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Comment by pphysch | Hacker News Reader

> Although some view the Fed's QE as a form of "money printing," it's not. It's an asset swap in which the Federal reserve buys a Treasury from a bank, issuing a reserve asset as a credit to the bank. Reserve assets thereby become "trapped" inside the banking system. They are not cash and can only be used under very restricted conditions (not unlike a laundry token) at least according to some sources.

According to the lede of [1], "[Federal Reserve Deposits] are interchangeable with Federal Reserve Notes", i.e. cash. But you are claiming the opposite. Do you have a source?

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Deposits

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I think they have a weird definition of creating money. Because they did say "The Federal government (through the Treasury) creates still more by issuing bonds to cover deficit spending.". So, they imagine the treasury printing the money, while the bonds are actually an IOU.

This is how I see it. Treasury makes new treasuries, and the Federal reserve buys them (through a bank, but it is a middle man only). Essentially, Federal reserve created money and loaned it to the government, holding the treasuries as IOU. This is further complicated as the Federal reserve is also mandated to give all profits to the treasury. So, essentially, the treasury did not create the money, only got a loan, but its loan payments are going to come back to itself.

I personally find it easier to dispel with the illusion of an independent fed, and just say the government (which includes both fed and treasury) prints money.

You’re missing a key detail: the Fed returns profits, but not loan principal. If the Fed keeps a T-bill until maturity and doesn’t roll it over, then the Treasury must actually pay the principal so the money is destroyed. It is only if the Fed actually cancels government debt that we could call it outright printing.

When the base money is itself an IOU, then debt issued by the privileged party is indeed printing money, albeit money with an expiration date.

It is true that a bank can convert reserves to notes, but that doesn’t mean the bank will actually do so. And if it does, it is merely facilitating the withdrawal of cash for its depositors, which means that the money already exists (in the form of a demand deposit account balance).

New money is created by debt issuance. This comes from both the federal government, which supplies the monetary base, and from commercial lenders, which leverage the monetary base through loans to the “real” economy—business startup loans, mortgages, supply chain finance, revolving lines of credit, etc.

A government bond (eg. a treasury) is a financial asset already, like cash but not as liquid. The swap was done to help avoid the "solvent but not liquid" scenarios, not to create new net assets (in first order effects).

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