An equally dirty secret is that "we must hold everyone to account policy" got demonstrated in the gold standard. It was a failure that ended in deflation and de

An equally dirty secret is that "we must hold everyone to account policy" got demonstrated in the gold standard. It was a failure that ended in deflation and depression. What "everything must make sense" policy effectively depends on is the idea that government finances and private sector finances (that can mean a person's/family's budget or a company budget) must look the same. That "the system as a whole" must sum to zero. This can easily be shown to be false. On might make the simple observation that if government DIDN'T have an institution like the FED that loaned ridiculous amounts of money while not making a great deal of profit on that lending, money wouldn't work. We also know what government policy worked pretty well the last 50 or so years. The process, when looked at from 100.000 feet is to take all money in the US, and divide 3%-5% of it out to everyone that wants to try something. Given as a loan, so that "try something" is strongly incentivized to mean "grow the economy". The FED does not effectively want that money back (again, if the FED took what it was owed money would cease to exist in the US). This is on top of all other taxes. That is what the FED effectively does, ignoring the details, pretending the many problems with it's functioning don't exist. We are pretty fucking damn happy with the result of this policy.