Quote from: kryptqnick on March 21, 2023, 05:27:15 PM

Is it fair to say it's all out of thin air over 14 years between 2008 and 2022? Some of it surely is, but the economy is also growing because huge new businesses appear, creating new jobs, new demand and offer, so since the charts are for the total assets, I think at least some of that printing has something reasonable justifying it.

Economic growth does not show up on the Fed's balance sheet. The balance sheet was essentially static between 2002 and 2007, despite all those years having good economic growth, with 2004 being as high as 4%. Everything on the balance sheet represents new money being printed by the Fed.

Quote from: kryptqnick on March 21, 2023, 05:27:15 PM

I agree that the US is playing with fire and has been doing so for a while, but sometimes it's hard to make a better choice than printing when you really need funds to fix something now and deal with the consequences later.

That's party of the problem. Politicians don't want to make the hard decisions now, because it will cost them elections. Better to make the easy decisions and kick the can down the road endlessly. That's why we are constantly printing money, why our deficit is constantly increasing, and why we have to constantly increase the debt ceiling. The debt is over $30 trillion and continuing to increase quickly. How high can it get before the whole thing collapses? And all the while, the average person just gets poorer and poorer.

Quote from: larry_vw_1955 on Today at 01:03:46 AM

if the government is willing to let tens of thousands of illegal immigrants come into the country and take up resources then I don't know what to say.

The amount spent on illegal immigrants is absolutely dwarfed by the amount we spend on military or our broken healthcare system. We spend 18% of GDP on healthcare - most of Europe spends around 11-12%.