Lol the difference is cn is just funning, I am not redefining the word seems.
I never said I don't understand the difference between US greenbacks and treasury notes.
It's all just funning.
I actually don't think I'm redefining the word anyway. So you didn't say they "
were the same," you said they "
seem" the same. This means based on what you looked at, you thought they were the same, or that you got the impression they were indeed the same, as per your definition. The fact that you couched with "seems" doesn't mean that you didn't make the claim, only that you were smart enough not to express absolute uncertainty. Indeed, wasn't I saying they weren't the same, and wasn't the substance of your reply "No, actually they do seem to be the same: [link intended to prove statement]"?
The Redemption was a side note of completely obliterating your silly notion that Federal Reserve Notes contain no debt or interest.
The redemption discussion was silly because it was baseless. This discourse has proven that! The original point was indeed that Federal Reserve Notes could exist without any debt underlying them, and also that even if something is formally structured as a debt, that structuring can be functionally irrelevant. The "Every dollar represents a loan with interest spiel!" is nonsense, since every dollar actually just represents a government command.
The Fed owns about $3 trillion in government securities. The interest payments go to the treasury (about $90 billion last year, for an average yield of 3%), which means the treasury doesn't effectively pay interest. Likewise, if the Fed doesn't delete the funds it used to create the bonds after they've matured, the treasury gets to collect the principal as well. Currency without debt! Yeah, yeah, the Fed "lent" the money and the treasury "paid interest," fair enough, but in the same sense that a "corporation" is a "person." Obviously a corporation is not a person, we just pretend that it is; similarly, the Fed doesn't necessarily lend money to the treasury and doesn't actually collect interest, we just pretend that it does.
Why doesn't the treasury just print and spend the money then, sparing us this legal fiction? Again, the Fed is an independent central bank, not subject to the whims of the treasury--its existence necessitates the legal fiction. If the Fed deletes the $100 it gets from a maturing government bond, the treasury is just borrowing and paying back money, effectively interest-free (the interest rate isn't about profit for the Fed, it's just a monetary policy tool that they use to affect all other interest rates--that's why Fed loans to the treasury are structured as interest-bearing loans even though the interest doesn't substantively exist). The Fed has the discretion to delete the $100, which is what makes it a "loan"--it's not necessarily the government's money, if it gets deleted at maturity. The treasury, alternatively, if it printed and spent $100, has made a permanent commitment; that $100 is in circulation forever. You could shred your tax revenue to remove currency from circulation, I suppose, but that sounds exceedingly problematic to me.
Your "where's the inflation" garbage got the smack down and now you are trying to save face.......very understandable, please carry on.
Of course it didn't. Show me an example!
The fact that the magic inflation unicorn appeared means surprisingly little to my quantitative mind.
Look, look at the unicorn! Look at him! Why am I looking at a magic unicorn instead of looking at some facts?
The only valid inflation point anyone has is about fixed incomes, because it's a very serious harm to some of the most vulnerable people, and even then we end up in a very peculiar place. Most people on "fixed incomes" are drawing them from the government. The government funds those programs with borrowing, which causes inflation, so presumably the programs couldn't exist in a system with "constitutional money" (you and others have made this suggestion in this thread). And yet the indictment against inflation is that it makes living harder for people who couldn't and wouldn't otherwise be getting any federal dollars at all?
(I don't consider erosion of savings to be meaningful since I think the inflation rate, so long as it's not inordinately high, is relatively easy to beat; you actually can beat the present inflation rate with a CD, for example. With a stable dollar, it's more difficult to increase your savings, because there are fewer investment opportunities available and substantially less wealth being created. Surely this is worthy of some consideration. Life really sucked when that dollar was stable, and arguably central banking and credit is what has fueled this amazing century of innovation and economic development.
I only care about beating the headline inflation rate because I think it only makes sense to measure the whole basket; people don't spend their savings on just one, two, or three things. To meaningfully measure the value of savings, you must measure what people actually buy with their savings and track the prices increases of those items actually purchased. The fact that one individual uses all of his savings to buy food is not representative of all other individuals, so the inflation rate of food cannot possibly be the average inflation rate experienced by the population.)