Is there any way to know how much new money the US is printing?
"The Fed doesn't exactly have a specific schedule when they decide to create a new dollar. Instead, they engage in open market operations, creating and destroying money as is necessary to preserve a certain interest rate for lending and borrowing. It's an ongoing process. When the Fed meets periodically and they see that inflation is getting out of hand, they will raise that rate; when they see that the economy is weak, they will lower it. They change the target rate from time to time, but they seldom tell people exactly what they'll do in advance, aside from them recently saying that rates will remain incredibly low ""for an extended period of time"". There are people who trade futures contracts based on what they think these rates will be, and the Fed does publish information on what the market thinks the probabilities are. That's probably the closest thing to telling you ""how much and when"". If you want to know about the size of the money supply, ask the Federal Reserve; you probably want series H.6, Money Stock Measures. For an explanation of what the data series there means, ask Wikipedia: you're probably interested in M2, because that's what actually affects the economy, though M0 is closer to what they actually ""print"" (currency, bills and coins, and deposits at the central bank). If you're concerned about the actual real value of your dollar dropping, the actual value drop is better understood by looking at either the inflation rate, or an exchange rate against a foreign currency (and depending on what you were hoping to use that dollar for, there are a couple of different inflation rates). The standard inflation rate which measures what happens in your day to day life is the consumer price index, published by the BLS. There are a variety of forecasts of this, but I'm not aware of any official government-agency forecasts." "The Federal Reserve is not the only way that money can be ""printed."" Every bank does fractional reserve banking, thereby increasing the money supply every time they make a new loan. There's a number called the reserve requirement which limits how much money each bank can create. Lowering the reserve requirement allows banks to create more money. Raising it will destroy money. But banks can also destroy money by calling in loans or being less willing to make new loans.  So when you look at the number of banks in the US, and the number of loans they all have, it's impossible to figure out exactly how much the money supply is expanding or contracting." "This chart summarizes the FED's balance sheet (things the FED has purchased - US treasuries, mortgage backed securities, etc.) nicely.  It shows the massive level of ""printing"" the FED has done in the past two years.  The FED ""prints"" new money to buy these assets. As lucius has pointed out the fractional reserve banking process also expands the money supply.  When the FED buys something from Bank A, then Bank A can take the money and start lending it out.  This process continues as the recipients of the money deposit the newly printed money in other fractional reserve banks. FYI....it took 95 years for the FED to print the first $900 billion.  It took one year to print the next $900 billion."
"Amount is the closest single word.  ""Amount in dollars"" would be the easiest way to specify information you are requesting.  ""Amount and currency"" if you ware in an area using multiple currencies.  An accountant might be able to give you a more technical term, but it would be accountancy jargon.  Amount due, credit amount, debit amount, amount deposited, amount credited, amount withdrawn, or amount included.  If you're writing instructions and want to specify that the person following the instructions needs to indicate the currency, you'll probably have to simply state that requirement.   Based on US centric thinking, inside the US, money is dollars, dollars is money.  For US citizens outside the country, we would always tack on the currency.  100 dollars, or 100 Euro.  There is a segment of Americans who do not understand geography, and that other countries exist, and that they use different currencies, might not realize that other countries have currencies named dollars, and that USD means US Dollars.  So for U.S. citizens, be specific and clear. Bottom line, if this is written for US residents, and they need to specify the currency, you need to explicitly require them to ""List the amount and currency.""" I believe there are two ways new money is created: My favorite description of this (money creation) comes from Chris Martenson: the video is here on Youtube. And yes, I believe both can create inflation. In fact this is what happened in the US between 2004 and 2007: increasing loans to households to buy houses created an inflation of home prices. "The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) publishes these and other relevant data on their Statistics page, in the ""Treasury & Agency"" section. The volume spreadsheet contains annual and monthly data with bins for varying maturities. These data only go back as far as January 2001 (in most cases). SIFMA also publishes treasury issuances with monthly data for bills, notes, bonds, etc. going back as far as January 1980. Most of this information comes from the Daily Treasury Statements, so that's another source of specific information that you could aggregate yourself. Somewhere I have a parser for the historical data (since the Treasury doesn't provide it directly; it's only available as daily text files). I'll post it if I can find it. It's buried somewhere at home, I think." Japan printed 11 trillion yen on Monday.  They do this by monetizing their own debt.  The increase in the supply of yen affects the value of the currency.  Strange thought, I know.  Greece has an economic crisis because they were borrowing at rates that AAA rated countries do.  Someone noticed that they weren't exactly a AAA country when they needed to ask for bailout money.  Since all government debt is considered risk free and same as cash, this came as a shock to most 'investors' hence the 'crisis'  edit: my bad, was 11 trillion, not 9 trillion "&gt; but the buying power of that money can be significantly reduced to the point where it's fundamentally useless, i.e. inter-war Germany and many countries in South and Central America.  That's true, but *how* does that come about? The effect on buying power stems from the level of spending in the present period. Too little leaves you anywhere from outright deflation and contraction to weaker growth falling short of capacity. Too much reaches capacity and keeps spending, bidding up prices and driving down purchasing power.  It has nothing to do with debt:GDP or interest payments.  &gt; Germany managed to skate by by creating a new Deutschmark in a confidence trick, and it worked because Germany is a solid, iron clad manufacturing powerhouse of a lot of stuff.   There are two important differences between inter-war Germany and the US. First is that inter-war Germany *lost a war*. This real shock is kind of important. When you're talking about buying power of money, one side of it is the amount of money in circulation but the other side of it is how much real output there is to buy and German real output capacity collapsed after the war. Their most productive regions were occupied territory and they were no longer a powerhouse manufacturing a lot of stuff, driving down the value of their currency.  So lesson number one from Germany: real output collapse harms your currency.  The second problem is that losing a war left Germany saddled with war reparations denominated in foreign currency. When you're on the hook for something you don't print you're in a situation where you can run out of money and that's exactly what happened to them. They tried printing more of their own currency to buy the foreign stuff with but that quickly drove down the value of German currency.  So lesson number two from Germany is you don't want to be on the hook for a currency you don't issue.  Put the two together and you have a real supply shock + foreign-denominated debt eviscerating the buying power of German currency. It wasn't debt:GDP but the real basis for their economy collapsing out from under them pushed along by a need for foreign currency.  &gt;My question is, at what point do we engage Washington's unlimited money printing presses until we reach that point?  In answer to your question, the printing presses are what funds the real economy. The worry in terms of avoiding ""that point"" is in making sure we keep that real economy productive and fully funded. Ironically, taking our eye off the ball to focus on budget balance at the expense of real output pushes the economy in the direction you're afraid of going. See also: the euro zone today." Im gonna make up some numbers for this teaching moment.  2011: $60,000  2012: $50,000  2013: $100,000  2014: $70,000  2015: $60,000  2016: $75,000  2017: $90,000  2017 is the highest number since 2013. But before we had 2017 data, we only had up to 2016 data. In 2016, 2016 was the highest number since 2013.   We couldn't say the same about 2015 though. In 2015, 2014 was the highest number since 2013.   Such short timetables are kinda ridiculous to even claim. This type of number is only meaningful if its a big number of years like biggest deficit since 1953 (60ish years ago) Money itself has no value. A gold bar is worth (fuzzy rushed math, could be totally wrong on this example figure) $423,768.67. So, a 1000 dollars, while worthless paper, are a token saying that you own %.2 of a gold bar in the federal reserve. If a billion dollars are printed, but no new gold is added to the treasury, then your dollar will devalue, and youll only have %.1 percent of that gold bar (again, made up math to describe a hypothetical). When dollars are introduced into the economy, but gold has not been introduced to back it up, things like the government just printing dollars or banks inventing money out of debt (see the housing bubble), then the dollar tokens devalue further. TL;DR: Inflation is the ratio of actual wealth in the Treasury to the amount of currency tokens the treasury has printed. "Although there are some good points made here as to the cause of inflation (mostly related to supply and demand), azcoastal does head in a different direction, one which I myself was going to take. Let me give a different angle, however. Another cause of inflation is the printing of money by the government (not simply replacing old money with new, but adding to the total money in circulation). If the government doubles the amount of currency in circulation (for the sake of argument and easy math), the value of all money decreases by a factor of 2. That's inflation, and the way G. Edward Griffin in The Creature From Jekyll Island puts it, it's really tantamount to a hidden tax. In a nutshell, the federal government wants to buy some cool stuff like new tanks or planes, or they want to give a bunch of food stamps to poor people, or they want to fly their private jets around, but they don't have enough money from taxes. So, they print money and spend it and buy their stuff. Because they've just increased the money in circulation, however, money loses its value. For example, your savings has dropped in value by half, despite the fact that the same number of dollars is in your savings account. This is just a way the government can tax you without taxing you. They buy stuff and you now have less money (i.e., your retirement is worth less) and you don't even know you just got taxed. Makes me sick that we let our ""leaders"" get away with this." "You can do a lot of deduction FINRA keeps a ""REG-SHO"" list created daily that tells what the daily short volume is. March 26th 2014's list: http://regsho.finra.org/FNSQshvol20140326.txt If you are talking about the United States, this answer may be better ;)" From Indian context, there are a number of factors that are influencing the economic condition and the exchange rate, interest rate etc. are reflection of the situation. I shall try and answer the question through the above Indian example. India is running a budget deficit of 4 odd % for last 6-7 years, which means that gov.in is spending more than their revenue collection, this money is not in the system, so the govt. has to print the money, either the direct 4% or the interest it has to pay on the money it borrows to cover the 4% (don't confuse this with US printing post 2008). After printing, the supply of INR is more compared to USD in the market (INR is current A/C convertible), value of INR w.r.t. USD falls (in simplistic terms). There is another impact of this printing, it increases the money supply in domestic market leading to inflation and overall price rise. To contain this price rise, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) increases the interest rates and increases Compulsory Reserve Ratio (CRR), thus trying to pull/lock-up money, so that overall money supply decreases, but there is a limit to which RBI can do this as overall growth rate keeps falling as money is more expensive to borrow to invest. The above (in simplistic term) how this is working. However, there are many factors in economy and the above should be treated as it is intended to, a simplistic view only. What a joke. The world economy would have collapsed without Goldman Sachs and Citibank? That is blatant propaganda and you're deluded if you believe it. Government intervention caused the housing bubble, and government intervention is what those huge banks relied on when they made 30:1 securities swaps wagers. Those bankers acted like criminals and the government cheered them on and made it easier. There is absolutely zero incentive for either the bankers or the politicians to be fiscally responsible, that is the problem.  Printing money has not caused harm? Are you mental? Printing money is outright theft from every working man. It is the epitome of corruption and the hallmark of a failing government slipping into fascism and plutocracy. They won't even tell us how much money is on the books anymore. It is an arbitrary amount which changes at their discretion.  There is more debt in the system than actual value, and the debt gains interest faster than the value appreciates. The entire currency system is designed to transfer money to the wealthy and carry a debt which can never be paid off. Those dollars that you and I work for every day are just a means to control us. "Many years ago, I worked on software that had to print the date, payee, and amounts on pre-printed checks.  Other than the MICR line (which had a particular placement with respect to the bottom edge and required a particular font in a particular point size), most aspects of the check layout and format were up to the particular check provider. Then there was a desire to start using optical character recognition to further automate check handling.  A standard came out, that most checks I see now seem to follow.  The standard dictated the exact dollar sign glyph to be printed to the left of the amount box.  This glyph was used by the OCR to locate the amount.  There were specific tolerances for where you could print/write the amount relative to that dollar sign.  There were also some requirements for the box containing the amount to have some clearance from the noisy backgrounds pre-printed on many checks.  But what font you used inside the amount box was, as far as I could tell, unspecified.  After all, customers could always hand-write the amount. Interestingly, the part of the check where you spell out the amount is known as the ""legal amount.""  If the amount in numerals and the amount in words don't match, the spelled version takes precedence, legally.  (The theory being that it's easier to doctor the numerals to change the apparent value of the check than it is to change the words.)  I always found it ironic that the layout standard to enable OCR standard was focused on reading the numerals rather than the legal amount.  OCR has come a long way since then, so I wouldn't be surprised if, nowadays, both amounts are read, even on hand-written checks. A little search shows that current (voluntary) standards are put out by the ANSI X9 group." "Currencies that are pegged or fixed require that foreign currencies are held by the central issuer at a proportional amount. This is analogous to having a portfolio of currencies that the central bank issues shares from - in the form of its own currency. We will continue with this analogy, if the central bank says these ""shares"" are worth $1, but the underlying components of the portfolio are worth $0.80 and decreasing, then it is expensive for the central bank to maintain its peg, and eventually they will have to disregard the peg as people start questioning the central bank's solvency. (People will know the $1 they hold is not really worth what the central bank says it is, because of the price changes people experience in buying goods and services, especially when it comes to imports. Shadow economies will also trade using a currency more reflective of labor, which happens no matter what the government's punishments are for doing so). Swiss National Bank (central bank) did this in early 2015, as it experienced volatility in the Euro which it had previously been trying to keep it's currency pegged to. It became too expensive for it to keep this peg on its own. The central bank can devalue its currency by adjusting the proportions of the reserve, such as selling a lot of foreign currency X, buying more of currency Y. They can and do take losses doing this. (Swiss National Bank is maintaining a large loss) They can also flood their economy with more of their currency, diluting the value of each individual 1 dollar equivalent. This is done by issuing bonds or monetizing goods and services from the private sector in exchange for bonds. People colloquially call this ""printing money"" but it is a misnomer in this day and age where printers are not relevant tools. The good and service goes onto the central bank's balance book, and the company/entity that provided the service now has a bond on its book which can be immediately sold to someone else for cash (another reading is that the bond is as good as cash). The bond didn't previously exist until the central bank said it did, and central banks can infinitely exchange goods and services for bonds. Bond monetization (also called Quantitative Easing) is practiced by the Federal Reserve in the United States, Bank of Japan, European Central Bank and now the Central Bank of the Republic of China" I'm not sure that the deflation will occur regardless of policy choice. There is a clear choice: inflation through printing or some sort of sustained deflation/deleveraging. I'd actually venture to guess that the powers-that-be are clearly on the side of printing. The federal reserve loans the US government dollars. The Federal reserve is NOT owned by the government, it is a private banking institution. So the US has to get capital from investor to borrow those dollars. Printing more dollars makes the dollars less valuable, and at the same time the investments less attractive unless there is a higher rate of interest attached to it.