Fed keeps interest rates at 23-year high
Fed keeps interest rates at 23-year high
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And yet inflation is not calming down and has actually been going up again over the past few months. I wonder if the Federal Reserve will just give up on getting inflation back down to 2% and say okay our new target is 3%.
They will not. They reasserted that they're getting to 2% at this meeting.
They don't have to do anything but not cut for long enough and they'll get to 2%, it's just a matter of how much damage they do along the way.
That would be true if inflation were at all controlled by the interest rate and not by massive corporate, profit seeking
inflation is controlled by money being printed that doesn't need to exist because it's too much and there's not enough goods and so therefore the interest rate makes a big difference.
That's not how inflation works. Inflation is a measure of costs. That's it. They track the costs of a whole bunch of products, put into baskets based on category, and measure the price change over time. That's literally the definition of what inflation is measuring.
If gas price goes up and everything else stays the same, inflation rises. Same for cars, groceries, consumer electronics, rent, housing, and almost everything else. If the average goes up, that's inflation. If the average goes down that's deflation. (It's more complicated than this, but it's close enough.)
Money being printed can cause inflation, because more money in the system makes each dollar less valuable potentially. It isn't the cause though. Banks can create money without printing any as well for that matter. If they loan out more of their percentage of holdings then that increases the money in the system, but the number of dollar bills stays the same.
Inflation is not based on the number of dollars. It's based on how much a dollar can buy. Printing more can make them buy less, but also the cost of goods and services increases equally makes them buy less. This can be caused by an increased drive for profit, like the above comment says.
Inflation can also be caused by a lack of consumer confidence in the purchasing power of their currency. For example, Argentina and Venezuela, where people will come by at like noon during the workday to get the money from their working person to buy groceries with before it loses its value. You get people in a store whose only job is to walk by items and change prices as inflation ravages the money supply.
Yep. It's purely a measure of (the change in) purchasing power. A lot of factors go into that, but printing money is not the only one, nor do I think it is usually a very large contributing factor, though I'm no expert. I don't think the US is printing a particularly different amount of money currently than normal though, so it's not really a factor here.
30% of all the dollars in existence were printed in 2020 and handed out as stimulus checks and foreign aid. Since then, we have had about a 30% inflation when you put everything together.
"They only printed notes worth $146 million in 2020 (https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/2020_currency_print_orders.htm). For comparison, the Treasury printed $206 million in 2019 and $233 million in 2019 (more than 2020)."
2020 was actually the year with the fewest notes printed in the last decade.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/initial_2023_currency_print_order.htm
Is that only taking into account physical printing or all printing of money even the digital shit? We already know that 99% of the money that exists in the US dollar is not physical. They can be "printed" just by adding some numbers on a computer.
Digital stuff is not adding more
moneybills, and it was also done before it was digital. That is just banks loaning out more of their reserve, like I mentioned in my first comment. It has no effect on the number of bills. It's a very different thing and not related at all. The fed can effect this by changing how much they're required to keep in reserve though. You'd have to look at that value to know.
That’s the Econ 101 explaination. Not accurate to the real world economy
Exactly, it's how much damage they'll do in the process. The Fed creates recessions and then booms with their monetary printing. Take the money printer away from them and you solve a lot of the problems. Because you adopt a sound money. Whether it be gold and silver or Monero. They all have limited supplies.
Spoken like someone who has loose understand of what they actually do.
Yeah, they balance inflation and unemployment. The idea of "sound money" is literal fools gold. We had currency backed by gold for thousands of years. There was a major recession every few years.
Every time some monarch coughed, there was a recession. If there was too much wheat, or not enough wheat: recession. The Federal Reserve has managed to save the economy during a literal world stopping pandemic. It's part of the reason why people use the US Dollar as the reserve currency.
What were they supposed to do? At this point all it seems the fed is doing is aggressively demolishing the power of labour and arming the owner class with more financial control.