Reply #26: I still don't understand how buying your own debt can even accomplish anything, or how it's possible

[ShadowLiberal]

Seriously, the whole idea just sounds like a joke making up a fake scam.

I mean the fed is part of the US federal government, and the US federal government prints the money, so how can they give themselves money?

Even more screwed up is how can you owe yourself interest? Because that's why people loan the US government money, to make a profit off of the interest.

And how exactly do you pay yourself back, do you collect $600 billion US dollars and burn it (after all if we're printing money to pay ourselves shouldn't we burn money to pay ourselves back?), or do you just decide 'oh we have $100 billion in the bank, so lets say we paid ourselves $100 billion back on those loans to ourselves, and then we took that $100 billion we paid ourselves with to pay off another $100 billion on those loans to ourselves'?

Seriously, there's no limits to the comedy one can make about this 'solution'.

Inflation isn't the problem that's causing people not to spend, it's the bad state of the market, it's the uncertainty about the future that's making everyone hold back right now. $600 billion dollars would do a heck of a lot more good in the form of a stimulus program to repair broken broken roads/bridges/etc. That would get some unemployed people a job and pump money into the economy into local businesses/etc.