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According to my understanding, burning US dollar bills, donating to the Fed (if such a thing is possible) and donating to the Treasury are approximately equivalent in their effects.

What puts a lid on how much money the Fed creates is the desire to keep inflation to reasonable levels, preferably 2% per year. Your burning your cash allows the Fed to create more while adhering to their inflation target. Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that although the Fed decides how much money is created, the Fed is not allowed to keep or to spend newly-created money, but rather must give it to the Treasury (perhaps through some complicated or non-obvious mechanism) which makes it available for the government to spend.



At least one way they do this is to buy treasury bonds. It is not clear to me what happens to the interest though .




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