Answer: The Federal Reserve
Question: Where does the Fed get the money to buy the bonds?
Answer: It creates it.
That’s right, the Fed has no money, but the Congress long ago empowered the Federal Reserve Bank to create money by buying government (and other) securities. This is known as “monetizing the debt,” which amounts to nothing more than “legalized” counterfeiting of dollars, and it has the same results as the injection of any other form of counterfeit money—the dilution of purchasing power of all the dollars already in circulation and the erosion of the value of all dollar-denominated assets.
Currency inflation must ultimately result in price inflation as those empty dollars (based on empty promises) work their way through the economy. Further, as those Fed-created dollars get deposited in banks, the banks are able to multiply their lending on the basis of these new “reserves.”
In an opinion article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, a former Treasury official says that:
“The recently released Federal Reserve Flow of Funds report for all of 2011 reveals that Federal Reserve purchases of Treasury debt mask reduced demand for U.S. sovereign obligations. Last year the Fed purchased a stunning 61% of the total net Treasury issuance, up from negligible amounts prior to the 2008 financial crisis.”
You might consider that to be a stealthy form of “quantitative easing.”
You can find out more about that, along with some pretty good analysis in an article that appears on the Money News website.
