[ExI] Summer weather and COVID-19

[John Clark]

On Sun, May 24, 2020 at 9:03 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

*> We point out the obvious to those who would loan the Fed money: this is
> a risky investment and getting more so.  You might never get your money
> back. *


That will never happen simply because unlike matter, energy and momentum
money is not conserved. The Federal Reserve has the legal right to
effectively create money from nothing, but as Spiderman says with great
power comes great responsibility, so that superpower must be used wisely.
It would be irresponsible to create astronomical amounts of new money if
the economy was already humming along at full capacity because it could
cause inflation, but there is not even a hint of inflation and there has
not been for decades, and with the pandemic the economy is currently
running way way way under full capacity.

And whatever the dangers that immediately printing vast amounts of new
money may be they are trivial compared to the dangers of not doing it. In
the last couple of months the income to 40 million American families has
dropped to zero and they've also lost their health coverage during the
worst pandemic in a century that has already killed 100,000 Americans with
no end in sight, and all those unemployed people are not going to just die
quietly. If the federal government refuses to create money and give
emergency aid to the American people then the federal government will not
be around for much longer, and neither will the constitution. I don't know
what will replace it but it won't be pretty.

John K Clark
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20200524/d9789bcc/attachment.htm>