5 ms·

> if the treasury department sells bonds on the open market, the federal reserves prints money to buy those bonds, then the treasury department uses that money

> if the treasury department sells bonds on the open market, the federal reserves prints money to buy those bonds, then the treasury department uses that money to pay interest on bonds held by the federal reserve; did anything really happen? I'm sure the treasury and the fed don't go to all that trouble to achieve precisely nothing. And I'm also sure that they have not found a way to achieve some positive result with zero downside or side-effects. That only happens in bedtime stories.

gizmo686 5y ago
They didn't achieve precisely nothing; when the treasury initially sold the bond to the fed, the achieved printing money for the treasury department to distribute to the rest of the government. [0]. The slightly convoluted mechanism that printing happened in imposes an ongoing book-keeping burden I described; but the cost of that additional bookkeeping is marginal at worst, as they need to do all that work anyway in order to: * Continue funding the budget deficit. (Unless they switch to the fed giving money directly to the treasury) * Sell government debt as a service to the global economy. (This is a distinct function from selling government debt to fund the government). * Control the economy by manipulating interest rates Why go through all the political and bureaucratic trouble of setting up a new mechanism of giving the treasury printed money, when the mechanism we have works just fine. I do see some political benifits to this approach: the debt boogyman would be move closer to the much more meaningful number that is "debt the US government owes to everyone who is not the US government" [1]; And the debt ceiling stops being a economic catastrophe that, for some reason, we debate imposing on ourselves every year or so. Granted, the political effect of this lack of a boogyman may be a net increase of printing, which does have an inflationary effect. Although, after the past two years, I'm not sure that this is the case any more. The discussion around government spending has not been focusing on the debt recently, but the money supply. Changing the way the government reports its debt does nothing to change the effect of deficit spending on the money supply. [0] In a way this is still nothing, as that is just setting numbers in a database nowadays. You have to go through a lot of layers of bookkeeping before any of this actually does anything. [1] To actually get this, you also need to exclude debt owed to other parts of the Government, such as the Social Security trust fund

gizmo686 5y ago

They didn't achieve precisely nothing; when the treasury initially sold the bond to the fed, the achieved printing money for the treasury department to distribute to the rest of the government. [0]. The slightly convoluted mechanism that printing happened in imposes an ongoing book-keeping burden I described; but the cost of that additional bookkeeping is marginal at worst, as they need to do all that work anyway in order to: * Continue funding the budget deficit. (Unless they switch to the fed giving money directly to the treasury) * Sell government debt as a service to the global economy. (This is a distinct function from selling government debt to fund the government). * Control the economy by manipulating interest rates Why go through all the political and bureaucratic trouble of setting up a new mechanism of giving the treasury printed money, when the mechanism we have works just fine. I do see some political benifits to this approach: the debt boogyman would be move closer to the much more meaningful number that is "debt the US government owes to everyone who is not the US government" [1]; And the debt ceiling stops being a economic catastrophe that, for some reason, we debate imposing on ourselves every year or so. Granted, the political effect of this lack of a boogyman may be a net increase of printing, which does have an inflationary effect. Although, after the past two years, I'm not sure that this is the case any more. The discussion around government spending has not been focusing on the debt recently, but the money supply. Changing the way the government reports its debt does nothing to change the effect of deficit spending on the money supply. [0] In a way this is still nothing, as that is just setting numbers in a database nowadays. You have to go through a lot of layers of bookkeeping before any of this actually does anything. [1] To actually get this, you also need to exclude debt owed to other parts of the Government, such as the Social Security trust fund