Printing money doesn't cause inflation if it doesn't get used. If the Fed chair hands me a $100T check and I hide it under my mattress then it has no effect on

Printing money doesn't cause inflation if it doesn't get used. If the Fed chair hands me a $100T check and I hide it under my mattress then it has no effect on prices. That check has to get put to use in order for it to start having effects on prices. I have to start buying properties and stuff and then the people that I buy the properties from go and put that money to use. That is extreme but its an example of how money actually has to get used to have an effect on prices. And we're seeing companies and the 1% and 0.1% sitting on massive piles of wealth. They invest that into safe short-term securities which pushes down interest rates. You see bubbles in things like certain rare baseball trading cards. What we haven't seen is wage-price inflation, because that doesn't translate down into the broader real economy. We aren't fixing all the infrastructure and potholes in the nation and putting middle class people to work, who would then go out an buy groceries, middle class houses, etc. SWEs, of course, have been the exception to that rule. But the wage-productivity coupling broke back in 1980s when "inflation" (wage inflation) was put under control. What is strange about the past year or two though is that there's now real upwards pressure on wages outside of tech workers. Don't know how much of that is due to COVID and long COVID removing workers from workforce and how much of that is workers looking at the pandemic and deciding that they weren't going to put up with any more bullshit HR cheerleading. The direct stimmy checks and eviction freeze may have helped with that as well -- although I think the indirect effect there was that many people were able to take a sabbatical and "just learn to code" and therefore hop up the wage ladder. I don't think we printed enough money there to really matter that much, but we gave everyone a 6+ month break so they actually spend some time jumping up the ladder rather than coming home from work too tired every day. The fact that we now see some hard signs of wage-price inflation in the data is the thing which is going to really freak the Fed out, and ultimately they're going to hit the brakes hard, once enough of the pandemic/ukraine supply-shock is in the rear view mirror. It actually is "different this time" because of the rise in wages across the board. The next crisis I think is going to be due to the Fed stomping on the brakes (and possibly the crypto ponzi imploding). Then they'll flip back to ZIRP again, but I think they may not be able to print enough money to get out of the next crisis (which is the problem of "pushing on a string" which everyone has totally forgotten that Keynes used to talk about).