The Fed is only creating bank reserves, which does not create more money. Therefore, the Fed has not been printing money.
When the Fed buys assets (government bonds, Fannies, etc.) from a bank, the bank gets back 'bank reserves', which are just a number in the bank's Federal Reserve account somewhere.
Those reserves can't be lent out. The bank can make no change to its lending, because it's a one-to-one swap (highly liquid government treasury -> bank reserve). A bank's constraint against lending more is its equity reserve ratio, which is unchanged by Fed asset purchases.
Again, this is not printing money; functionally speaking, US Treasuries are already 'money' to a bank (they are extremely liquid, widely traded internationally, safe, and in many contexts actually preferable to cash), so swapping a US Treasury with cash is just turning one type of money into another; no net creation.
There's a simple reason the Fed doesn't clear up this confusion: the central bank prefers people to think they are printing money, because credibility is important to their effectiveness. And the Fed doesn't actually print money, because they don't have the legal authority to do so. This is why Powell is regularly getting in front of Congress to urge more stimulus spending: he knows it's the only way to get dollars directly into the hands of ordinary Americans.
Functionally there's little to no difference between what you've described and what is colloquially known as "money printing". You've essentially just redefined "money" to include U.S. treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, and then stated that it's just an asset swap and not money printing.
You can use whatever terminology you want, but at the end of the day, the Federal Reserve is creating money out of thin air and using it to buy real assets. You can argue that the effect of this is not as dramatic as printing money to buy a bunch of luxury condos or sports cars, but at that point we're just debating the degree of influence. The whole point of Fed money printing is to influence the economy, so if it didn't anticipate any difference, it wouldn't be doing it.
No. I think what the poster is saying is that running a government deficit is printing money. Fiscal policy is money printing, not monetary policy. This is very much not what is colloquially known as money printing, rather it's the basis of modern money theory.
Monetary policy is just swapping one kind of USD denominated assets for another. It doesn't really change the size of private bank balance sheets, hence it is not the printing of money. But increasing the size of the deficit does indeed increase the sizes of private bank balance sheets.
When the government borrows money like the US does, then it is setting itself up to either run a hefty surplus or go with money printing. Both of those are pretty unpleasant for someone (either borrowers or savers). So yes, fiscal policy is where the eventual pain is locked in.
But, and I feel there is being something lost to semantics in this thread, we have an article reporting "the U.S. money supply has grown 20%". Given that the US economy has been partially shut down for most of that time it is hard to see what that can be described as except money printing. The alternatives are polite euphemisms for money printing or appeals to it all somehow being so complicated a measured >20% change doesn't count.
I still don't understand why people are so keen to let the government go unchecked (we don't send our best & brightest to be politicians) and to keep kicking salary earners to the benefit of asset earners (pretty sure we all earn a salary).
I'm not saying that we didn't print money this year. I'm arguing over how we measure the quantity of the money supply. I am saying that government debt = the quantity of money.
"The federal government ran a budget deficit of $3.1 trillion in fiscal year 2020, CBO estimates, more than triple the shortfall recorded in 2019"
By my definition, we did print $3.1 trillion of money this year.
I don't go by the size of the Fed balance sheet as money supply. There are many reasons for this, and plenty of people on this thread are trying to explain this view point.
> I think what the poster is saying is that running a government deficit is printing money.
The government borrows the money from bond buyers, so that's also not printing money. (The Fed does buy these bonds, but not directly from the government because the government can't do anything with bank reserves. The Fed can only "print" bank reserves therefore it can only buy assets from banks.)
There exists many values of X where borrowing money from X constitutes printing money. For example, when you borrow money from a bank, the bank prints money. It credits your account with new money, it does not transfer money into your account from another account.
It's fairly straightforward to prove that increasing the size of the government deficit = printing money.
1. The first step is that the government prints debt (a Treasury instrument, for example). I think we would agree on this.
2. The government then needs to monetize the debt... essentially swapping the new debt with reserves held by some bond buyer. There is no shortage of reserves (this is certainly true today. But even when there were reserve requirements, or in the time before 2008, there was still practically no shortage of reserves. I can provide a separate explanation for this). You may stop and say "but what if there is no bond buyer?" or "but what if there are bond vigilantes?" US banks will always swap excess USD reserves (where excess means beyond what is necessary for settlement) for USD treasury instruments because the latter pays higher interest.
3. The government now spends its reserves, transferring from the US Treasury to a private bank upon making purchases. This becomes new bank credit, aka freshly printed money. In other words, a private bank receives reserves via the Fed's payment system and must credit the recipient's private checking account with new money.
4. The reserves that were considered "excess reserves" in step 2 are now back in the banking system, ready to be swapped again for new debt instruments.
In other words, the net impact on private bank balance sheets is, just from fiscal spending (no activity from the Fed other than as a payment/settlement system):
- The assets side gains a treasury instrument
- The liabilities side is credited with new money caused by purchases by the US Treasury. This is spendable US dollars.
- No change is seen in the quantity of bank reserves
The Treasury simply issues the bonds. It isn't analogous to borrowing money, as there is no collateral to put up and no other entity in the economic system needs to have any savings in order for the US Treasury to issue the bonds. The bonds are traded one-to-one for reserves at the maturity dollar value, so this is not borrowing. It is a swap.
Merely having a different purchase value from maturity value is not enough to qualify a bond purchase as borrowing either, because Bond issuing is not restricted by any economic opportunity cost. The amount of Bonds issued is an simply edict by Congress, when it passes a Budget resolution.
Inflation (in the consumer goods sense) only happens when the value of money goes down for the average person. The price of lettuce isn't going to rise because the fed isn't buying lettuce with faerie money, they're buying securities. And the stock market has gone up and to the right, despite all logical indicators on the ground indicating it should go solidly opposite. Securities are hugely inflated.
That turns out to be the answer I've been trying to figure out for years: regardless of the technicalities of "printing money", all this quantitative easing should have been causing inflation. And it is... in the stock market, which doesn't figure into the consumer price index.
The CPI, meanwhile, has been stable, or even under the Fed's target. Presumably because those are basics, and you don't really need to buy much more of the basics just because you have more money. (The people with newfound stock wealth, that is; the people without it don't have any more money to spend in the first place.)
It's still a little unclear to me why the S&P 500 has remained in the "inflated but not insane" through most of the past decade -- though for the past week or so it's trending back to "insane" (a P/E ratio well above 20). That means that earnings were coming from somewhere, and if not from core consumer products, then presumably from other things that the stock-market-wealthy were buying from each other, at presumably inflating prices, or at least quantities.
All the QE since 2007 has also caused massive inflation in real estate, and it's ongoing. Housing is actually rising in some markets in spite of record unemployment and a high risk of many mortgage defaults.
It's worth pointing out that housing costs are included in CPI (by proxy of rent).
On an inflation adjusted dollars-per-square-foot basis, housing is exactly the same price as it was in the 1970s [1] -- right around $115/sqft in constant dollars. 2008 didn't actually make a big dent on average.
The reason houses are more expensive today than they were in the past is that they're on average twice as big. This is due to city zoning ordinances, not inflation.
Similarly house prices exploded in major metros like SF because of artificial supply constraints. The city won't allow new building -> refuses to allow smaller units -> prices go up. Again, not inflation.
>> It's worth pointing out that housing costs are included in CPI (by proxy of rent).
I think that is the reason CPI hasn't increased. CPI only accounts for rent and not the cost of actually buying the house. There are definitely highly inflated price to rent ratios particularly in land constrained urban areas.
I think a better way to put it is that there is low/no Consumer Price Inflation but there is tremendous Asset Inflation (in stuff that wealthy people buy).
And perhaps if there did need to be inflation, then perhaps this is better than the reverse (i.e. high CPI inflation which would impact people's ability to buy the basics)?
> There are definitely highly inflated price to rent ratios particularly in land constrained urban areas.
The point I was making was that the price of housing on average ($/sqft) is the same as it has always been. Since we know major metros have gone up it likely means that tier-2 and below cities have actually gone down.
Further, it might be nuanced, but major urban areas aren't land-constrained. They are constrained by their city councils staunch refusal to permit new, tall construction to the benefit of existing landowners and at the detriment of renters. This is not an inflation-linked issue however but a city policy issue. It's strictly supply and demand.
You could say that houses are twice as big because nowadays you have the dual-income family, and a family pays more for one house because the amount of money on the supply side has increased, so prices on the demand side have caught up. The fact that now there is twice as much enclosed space is immaterial, a family needs a house to live in.
I suspect families were actually larger in the past than they are today, as evidenced by the rapidly declining fertility rate. In the 1970s there was an average of 2.48 births per woman, and today it's 1.77. My unsubstantiated opinion is that folks were willing to make do with less in the past, and again, city councils have forbidden building smaller buildings forcing the real costs up -- not through $/sqft but rather mandatory minimum sqft if you will.
==That means that earnings were coming from somewhere, and if not from core consumer products, then presumably from other things that the stock-market-wealthy were buying from each other, at presumably inflating prices, or at least quantities.==
It isn’t a given that you need to increase earnings to increase your P/E ratio. The “E” is your Earning Per Share. Buying back shares lowers your denominator and magically increases EPS, which drives the price higher.
It's been a hot, hot minute from my econ degree, but here goes...
I believe the big question of "Where is the inflation" has to do with lending excess reserves. The amount banks have to keep in reserve is set, but it changes. They can lend the balance after that, although there's a rate set by the fed that also works as a lending/holding incentive too.
"Excess reserves are capital reserves held by a bank or financial institution in excess of what is required by regulators, creditors or internal controls. For commercial banks, excess reserves are measured against standard reserve requirement amounts set by central banking authorities"
So, this money actually hasn't really hit circulation. It doesn't really explain what's up with the SP (perhaps: credit based on reserve holdings, to hand wave a ton of complexity...), but it explains why there's no direct pipeline from Fed money prints -> my wallet -> CPI.
The Fed has already been buying ETFs, which is about a hair’s breadth away from buying stocks. I don’t doubt that they’ll buy stocks to prop up investors if the current stimulus proves ineffective.
Barely. They are only buying corporate bonds and the sum total of "Includes non-marketable U.S. Treasury securities, supranationals, corporate bonds, asset-backed securities, and commercial paper at face value" is 85.274 billion or a max of 1.2% of their asset sheet [0].
Because they are pocketing the difference by arbitraging between the government (who issue the treasuries) and the Fed (who is the ultimate buyer) since the Fed cannot buy treasuries directly from the government. It's just a complicated way for the government to print money and hand it out and in this case banks are able to act as the middleman and earn money on the spread.
It's a disgraceful system that is extremely morally questionable.
It's inflation through other means. You get asset price inflation instead of commodities / consumer goods inflation. It's a slow death rather than a quick one.
The Bureau of Printing and Engraving prints money, but Federal Reserve Notes are in fact a claim on bank reserves. It's just when you deposit them at your bank you don't get reserves, they instead create a bank deposit for you and a liability for them and then add the reserves you just gave them to THEIR account.
Creating bank reserves absolutely creates money. Bank reserves are the fulcrum around which bank leverage ratios operate. Yes, they can margin treasuries to borrow reserves from other banks, and in that sense, they are fungible. But the total amount of bank reserves in the system at any one time is still what bounds the total amount of money creation that can happen via leverage. Increasing the absolute amount of bank reserves increases the money supply, by a factor roughly equal to the current reserve requirement ratio (up to demand for credit, etc, etc.).
> Doesn't reducing the price of lending tend to lead to more lending?
Theoretically, yes. If loans are 2% instead of 4% then that may induce people to take one up to do some kind of economic activity (start business, renovate house, buy a new car, etc).
But it is not guarantee: people may feel too financial vulnerable to take risks with borrowed money. This is where the limits of monetary policy are run it.
There are points where the government starts spending on various projects: if a contractor is hired to build a bridge, and it will take "x" years, then all of its employees may feel more confident and do more spending because for the next "x" years they're set. Their money then goes into other people's pockets, into other people's pockets, etc.
Public/government spending to kickstart demand is what Keynesian economics basically is.
Sure, there are limits. But fundamentally, holding all else constant, increasing bank reserves decreases the cost of lending, which increases the quantity of lending, which increases the money supply.
Not necessarily. When rates are low, banks are more cautious with who they lend it to. And in times like these, it's especially risky for a bank to lend, and couple that with absence of high rates for a bank to mitigate the risk, you end up with actually less lending.
On this chart [0] you can see how lending increase when crisis started, kind of matching inflation of the dollar. But lending is slowing down, and no amount of QE can speed it up, indicating probable deflation of the dollar.
New money, enters the economy by two ways:
banks lean to households/business or government direct spending. New reserves in the system doesn't create money.
The quantity of reserves in the system limit the quantity of money that the private banks can lend to the real economy (actually, not really, but that's another discussion), but the existence of reserves doesn't make the bank to lean.
For the banks to lean, it's necessary that there is demand for credit first.
Because there is not demand for credit, never mind the number of reserves in the system. The central bank have not power to stimulate the economy in this situation, that's the reason central bankers are pushing the governments to spend directly.
>The central bank have not power to stimulate the economy in this situation, that's the reason central bankers are pushing the governments to spend directly.
Sounds very political for a supposedly independent central banking system!
This system is a disgrace and is governed by unelected technocrats who are able to yield a crazy amount of power over the economy without ever being subject to inquiries from the public, all in the interest of experimenting on the population with highly questionable economic models.
In my opinion we would never have been in this situation in the first place were it not for the artificial credit growth and consequent boom caused by central bankers.
>> The central bank have not power to stimulate the economy in this situation, that's the reason central bankers are pushing the governments to spend directly.
> Sounds very political for a supposedly independent central banking system!
The phraseology makes it sound political, but it is not political.
Basically when a central bank cuts its rate down to 0.25%, 0%, or even negative (e.g., Switzerland), it's a signal that the central bank has done all it can do to get the economy going. (There are some other mechanism employed in recent years as well ("quantitative easing"), but the message is the same: we are at the limits of monetary policy.)
After that it is up to governments, if they so choose, to also do fiscal policy initiatives, e.g., Keynesian economics: create economic demand through public spending (since private business spending/demand is in the toilet).
Of course government are free not to do anything at all, which would generally entail lower economic growth and higher employment.
But central banks have a mandate to make sure the economy is in a certain middle-ground: not too hot to induce a lot of inflation, and not too cold to have a lot of people out of work.† Everyone agrees to these goals ahead of time:
> The Federal Reserve works to promote a strong U.S. economy. Specifically, the Congress has assigned the Fed to conduct the nation’s monetary policy to support the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.
The "unelected technocrats" are doing what they were hired to do. They each have a fixed term (though renewable), and if they don't do what they're supposed to they are replaced.
They did not sneak into these positions: they were told to work towards certain goals, and they are using the tools at their disposal. They are no different than the Board of a corporation hired by the shareholders of the company: it's just that the "shareholders" are elected representatives (Congress, parliaments, etc).
If the Board is not doing a satisfactory job it can be sacked with cause if necessary.
† Sometimes you actually have both: see "stagflation".
Of course the existence of reserves doesn't force a bank to lend. It increases their capacity to lend, which, assuming there is sufficient demand for credit, increases the money supply.
So you agree that creating reserves is not necessarily inflationary.
Also, a bank is not limited by reserves to lend. In fact, in practice, banks first lend and then search for the reserves in the inter-bank market. Those demand-offer dynamics between banks determine the interest rate. If the Central Bank doesn't want to loss control of the interest rate, it has to increase reserves in the system when there is demand.
Central Banks have to choose, or they control the quantity or reserves or they control the interest rate. They target the later. The quantity is kind of irrelevant.
> So you agree that creating reserves is not necessarily inflationary.
Not necessarily, no. But in practice they create inflationary pressure.
> Also, a bank is not limited by reserves to lend. In fact, in practice, banks first lend and then search for the reserves in the inter-bank market. Those demand-offer dynamics between banks determine the interest rate. If the Central Bank doesn't want to loss control of the interest rate, it has to increase reserves in the system when there is demand.
This is exactly what my original post said. Of course they search for reserves in the inter-bank lending market. But the more reserves there are in that market, the cheaper they are to borrow, which reduces the rate that banks have to charge to earn their spread, which increases demand for credit, which increases the money supply.
> Because there is not demand for credit, never mind the number of reserves in the system.
Generally correct, but it should be noted that if a bank has a lot of reserves, and the over-night lending market is cheap, that means the bank has access to 'cheap money' on the 'wholesale' end of things.
So if a retail bank can get 'cash' cheaply, it can lower its interest rates to its 'retail' customers (mortgages, business loans, etc).
If a bank wants (say) at least a 2% spread between its wholesale source of money/reserves and what it gives out to the real economy, then the Fed raising liquidity such that the over-night rates go from (e.g.) 2% to 0.5%, that means banks can drop their public facing rates as well.
Someone who was not considering borrowing money at 4% may change their mind at 2.5%.
>>"Someone who was not considering borrowing money at 4% may change their mind at 2.5%."
We agree: when the interest rate arrive down to zero there is nothing more than the central bank can do to stimulate the economy. They could add infinite reserves to the economy and nothing would happen, because, obviously, the private sector is not interested in investment. Monetary policy is a blunt instrument.
> The Fed is only creating bank reserves, which does not create more money. Therefore, the Fed has not been printing money.
> When the Fed buys assets (government bonds, Fannies, etc.) from a bank, the bank gets back 'bank reserves', which are just a number in the bank's Federal Reserve account somewhere.
The money in my saving (or chequing) account is just a number in the bank's account somewhere, but it is still "money" that I have with them. Similarly the Federal Reserve is a bank account for the banks: so your bank (BoA, Chase, Wells Fargo, etc) has money at the Fed just like I have have money at (e.g.) Citibank.
Otherwise, your statement "the Feds buys assets" makes no sense: with what exactly does the Fed buy the assets if not money? "Money" in the modern economy is (1) a means of exchange, (2) a unit of account, and (3) a store of value. In this case we are using (1). Just because the "money" is in digital form does not change its essence.
> […] so swapping a US Treasury with cash is just turning one type of money into another; no net creation.
Can US Treasury bills be used for reserve calculation purposes? Because if they cannot, then the higher reserve accounts mean that banks would be able to create more loans (assuming they can find borrowers).
While reserve holdings and T-bills may have similar net values, each may be have restrictions on how they can be used in various circumstances, which could have knock-on effects.
Bank reserve ratios [1] operate as a percentage, so by creating more bank reserves, you create more money that can be lent out. Say that the reserve ratios requirement is 10%, which it currently is. Then for every dollar it has in reserves, the bank may create $10 in loans. The bank reserves don't themselves circulate as money, but they let the bank create more credit, which does circulate as money.
The credit department of a bank, doesn't check if the bank have enough reserves before lending. They only check if the new lending make senses from a business perspective. If it does, it concede the credit to the customer.
The bank is legally obliged to have the reserves, so, a posteriori (and not before) the bank will try to get the reserves in the inter-bank market (from other banks). If there are not enough reserves in the system the price of the reserves will go up. That's the interest rate.
Central banks don't target the quantity of reserves, they only care about the interest rate. So, if they want to keep the interest rate in their target, they have to create new reserves. So, it's the lending what create reserves, not the other way around.
The main thing limiting how much Canadian banks can lend out would be to remain profitable: too many loans, to too many bad investment ideas, means losses.
- Banks send payments in real time. The system does not involve any transfer of assets, but it does require pledging collateral (often government debt). Asset transfers occur outside of the system. For example, if bank A sells a government debt instrument to bank B, then bank B sends a payment to bank A in the system, and then A transfers the instrument to B outside of this system.
- At the end of each day, settlement is done. Each private bank has a net balance at the end of the day. The net balances sum up to zero across the system, and post-settlement, each individual bank must have a net zero balance. In order to do so, they can either send/receive payments from/to another private bank for overnight loans. Or they can deal with the central bank, by having their reserve balance credited/debited, or by getting an overnight loan from the central bank at a rate determined by the central bank. With overnight loans, no assets are transferred... there's just a promise to pay back the next day via sending a payment.
A few notable things about reserves in the system:
- Use of reserves is totally optional. In practice, banks hold very little reserves.
- The quantity of reserves is entirely determined by demand from private banks.
- Reserves are never transferred from one private bank to another. They are only transferred between central bank and private bank.
Everything you say is correct as I understand things, but some elaboration is in order. "Printing money" is a factually inaccurate rhetorical term meant to emotionally manipulate people with visions of Zimbabwe or Weimar Germany, but fact is that under current law the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury can work in concert to add net financial assets to the private sector's aggregate balance sheet without new fiscal policy. For example while the Fed isn't buying public company equity directly yet, the bond market provides a transmission mechanism for a company to create otherwise worthless or at least discounted equity and sell it at face value to the Fed. Sure from a balance sheet perspective it all balances, because that's how bookkeeping works, but as a practical matter it means more money available to the private sector.
They are, the argument that the poster above you put forward is such a tired argument and I really do not understand why people are trying to hide the fact that the Fed is actually creating money out of thin air and buying assets from banks for it. The Fed doesn't technically "print" the Federal Reserve Notes, but for all intents and purposes it is legitimately money that is being created, only digitally. You are entirely correct in your assessment that they are manipulating the market by being an agent with unlimited amounts of cash and can therefore provide options for banks that they otherwise wouldn't have in a free market.
Also bank reserves can be used as collateral for further loans, just because you don't lend out the actual reserves doesn't mean more money isn't being created, it's just done in a roundabout fashion.
Collateral is the wrong term, apologies for that - what I mean is that expanded bank reserves can be used to back an expansion of credit from the bank in question.
In order to expand credit, banks need borrowers that demand credit. Never mind the number of reserves available if there is nobody asking for credit. That's the reason there is not inflation.
In the current economy, a reactivation of the economy have to come from government spending (fiscal policy). Central Banks (monetary policy) are powerless when the interest rate have gone all the way down.
The is (give or take money market funds) the total sum of money in US bank accounts. Compare and contrast with 2008 for example, where the asset money creation was restricted to the asset side because it was used to take dodgy loans out of the banking system and put them into runoff.
As to why there isn't much inflation yet, well there is. The stock market is considerably inflated due to this, and inflation will creep into the rest of the financial system over time, as this works its way into regulatory capital.
but tldr: it is absolutely printing money - arguably it was the only thing they could do at the time, and the European Central Bank has done similar although less dramatic things, but the longer term consequences will definitely be interesting.
As for inflation -- it's a really slow system that we're looking at here, the inflation depends on where the money ends up, hence the stock market behaviour, but over time it will cause inflation elsewhere.
We look back at historical periods like Weimar, like 1929 as if they happened instantly. But to the people trapped within those moments, they happened day by day, slowly playing out. Irving Fisher is notorious not because he called an end to the crash in 1929, but because he repeatedly called an end to the stock market crash for the next two years.
It would take 3 years for the immediate effects triggered by the US crash in September 29 to play out, and arguably another 20 or more years for the longer term ones. The US money supply actually started shrinking 6 months before the crash as it happened. This is all just the beginning.
I think you're sort of trying to have it both ways here. The Fed has been printing money for 12 years in hopes of increasing CPI. But real people, who buy the stuff in the CPI basket, don't have M2, so no CPI bump. It took a long time for central banks to realize this. And even astute minds like John Paulson got tripped up on this one. Starting in 2009, he bought as much gold as he could because he feared rampant CPI inflation (which never came).
As a thought experiment, imagine someone builds a real, functional money printer in their basement and dialed it to print 10% of current M1.
Would prices at the grocery suddenly skyrocket? Obviously not. Even though the money printer is running, and the money supply has grown, no one really knows about it. Even if a press release was put out about the increase in M1, there would likely not be CPI inflation (putting aside any concern about the money printer itself).
Now, to take the example further, let's say the owner of the money printer started buying up real estate with the cash. Would you see CPI? Still, no. You'd probably see some inflation in the local areas where the real estate was being purchased, if it was done in sufficient volume.
Now, to bring the argument to a close, what if you started buying junk bonds and securitized mortgages? Would you see CPI inflation? No. Would you see asset price increases? Yes, probably. It would be hard to correlate the asset price increases to the money printing, which might be the point. Mortgage originators can start climbing the risk ladder now that the money printer is buying up all these securitized mortgages, and companies can also behave in more risky ways and know that they'll get the financing from the money printer. Increased risk can drive an increase in earnings, which will be rewarded with stock appreciation.
With the money printer stepping in and providing loose financing, the cost of money goes down. Now, previous money lenders have a harder time getting yield, and may climb the risk ladder as well to find the yield they need. This will also be seen in asset appreciation, across bonds, stocks, real estate, & more.
A follow-up, which was less obvious to me than it should have been: Are we sure that central bankers really want CPI inflation, when they choose not to use such an obvious path to it?
This helps put a bit more nuance on the two questions I wish we'd see answered from this in thirty days:
What percentage of dollars issued in bank loans, whose issuance depended on this increase in Fed reserves, are expected to be issued to individual citizens who make $72,900 or less (the AMT threshold for 2020, iirc)?
What percentage of dollars are expected to be issued to businesses with gross revenue of $1mil/year or less?
If you were to change "US Treasuries" to "British Pounds" everything you state about liquidity &c. remains true, but it's perhaps more clearly creating new dollars that weren't there before.
> There's a simple reason the Fed doesn't clear up this confusion...
There is no confusion, the term is called "monetizing debt" where they create 'money' out of thin air to buy government debt from banks who then use this money to create even more money via fractional reserve lending.
When the Fed buys assets (government bonds, Fannies, etc.) from a bank, the bank gets back 'bank reserves', which are just a number in the bank's Federal Reserve account somewhere.
Those reserves can't be lent out. The bank can make no change to its lending, because it's a one-to-one swap (highly liquid government treasury -> bank reserve). A bank's constraint against lending more is its equity reserve ratio, which is unchanged by Fed asset purchases.
Again, this is not printing money; functionally speaking, US Treasuries are already 'money' to a bank (they are extremely liquid, widely traded internationally, safe, and in many contexts actually preferable to cash), so swapping a US Treasury with cash is just turning one type of money into another; no net creation.
There's a simple reason the Fed doesn't clear up this confusion: the central bank prefers people to think they are printing money, because credibility is important to their effectiveness. And the Fed doesn't actually print money, because they don't have the legal authority to do so. This is why Powell is regularly getting in front of Congress to urge more stimulus spending: he knows it's the only way to get dollars directly into the hands of ordinary Americans.