Can We Print Infinite Money to Pause the Economy During the Coronavirus Pandemic?
By Matthew Gault
The Fed prints money. What happens if we printed enough money to make sure everyone keeps their job?
More than 16 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits in the past four weeks. Economists estimate that the jobless rate in the U.S. is around 13 percent, the worst it’s been since the Great Depression. To stave off economic collapse, the Federal Reserve has turned on the money printing machine. It’s going brrrr.
With all these people out of work, businesses closed, and economic activity stagnating, some experts have suggested we can put the economy on “pause” by, essentially, printing infinite money, and giving it to businesses and people to keep things more or less the way they were before the coronavirus pandemic hit.
Checks are on the way to Americans, but that’s cold comfort for people with bills to pay now and who have no idea when, if ever, they’ll get back to work. To get through the crisis, can the Fed just print unlimited money? What are the consequences of just giving everyone enough cash to survive the next few months?
According to David Weil, a Professor of Economics at Brown University and the Director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Wealth and Income Inequality Project, it’s complicated.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.
Motherboard: Are you familiar with the “money printer go brrr” meme?
David Weil : Yes, yes.
When we talk about financing the spending that's gonna happen, people conflate two things. One is the federal government going to debt markets and borrowing—that is issuing bonds.
So the deficit for this year was going to come in at about a trillion dollars. So the federal government was going to have to issue a net trillion dollars of bonds to finance operations. That's before all this happened.
And the debt was somewhere around $17 trillion. And now, with what's happened to the economy already and with the spending bills that have been passed already, It looks like the deficit for this coming year is going to be, lord knows, $3 trillion? $4 trillion? And the government's gonna have to borrow a lot of money.
Money, this special asset, is created by the Federal Reserve, which is part of the government. And it is true that the Federal Reserve creates money out of nothing. The Federal Reserve snaps fingers and a little computer entry in a bank account at the Fed suddenly has an extra billion dollars in it.
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