San Jose State economics professor Jeffrey Rogers Hummel tells all his students that the easiest way to understand the Federal Reserve is to think of it as a giant, legalized counterfeiter. I had always known that the Fed and other central banks were like counterfeiters, but I still thought that the actual mechanics of open-market operations and so forth actually provided some important distinctions.
In large part because of my frequent email exchanges with Hummel, I now realize that I was being naïve. Once you understand the details of modern central banking, you are able to step back and see that it truly is a way for the government to use the printing press to pay its bills. All of the complicated process of targeting interest rates through buying Treasuries simply hides this essential point — and perhaps deliberately so.
An Old-Fashioned Monarch With a Printing Press
Before we examine Fed operations, let's start with something simpler. Suppose there is a powerful monarch reigning over a large, industrialized country. The monarch has managed to wean his subjects off commodity money such as gold or silver, and instead they use fiat notes, rectangular slips of paper featuring the king's portrait. The king has a printing press at his disposal, which gives him unlimited ability to create more slips of paper with which he can buy goods throughout his kingdom.
At first, one might think that our hypothetical king has infinite wealth. But upon reflection, we see that there are actually pragmatic limits on how much new money he will print up each year. It's true that there are no legal constraints on how many notes he can create, but the more monetary inflation he sows, the greater the price inflation he will reap.
At some point, the monarch would actually make himself poorer in the long run by running the printing press too heavily in the present. For example, if he doubled the stock of money in one year, the resulting price inflation would destabilize his economy and cause much needless capital consumption. His subjects would be less willing to invest in their businesses and retirement portfolios, knowing that he might effectively confiscate their savings again through massive creation of new money. Foreign investors too would be wary of exposing themselves to his country if he made his fiat currency too volatile.
Because of these considerations, the monarch would no doubt run off new money every year from his printing press, but he wouldn't overdo it. He would aim for a moderate level of constant price inflation, with the purchasing power of his fiat currency slowly falling over time in a predictable manner. Each year, the new influx of money into the economy would represent a transfer of wealth from all other currency holders into the king's possession.
Now what if our monarch is really profligate? What if he wants to spend more money than the income and tribute he earns in his position as monarch, even including the amount of new money he dares to create each year with his printing press, can support? In this case, the monarch can still resort to old-fashioned borrowing. Therefore in any given year, the monarch can only spend what he collects in tribute (taxes), debt financing, and inflation.
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