Have you ever wondered why countries can't just print more money to off their debts...
or to feed the homeless or fix unemployment, or any other issue for that matter.
Now, this may seem like a rather silly question, but I think it may be one of those questions
people might be a bit too embarrassed to ask, but there's shortage of people wondering.
The short answer can be summed up in just one word... inflation. Inflation is defined
as "a persistent, substantial rise in the general level of prices related to an increase
in the volume of money and resulting in the loss of value of currency".
But I'll get to that... first though, we need to establish exactly what money... is. Now
this may seem obvious, but something that's important to know, is that money, has absolutely
no... intrinsic value. What that means is that money in itself has no actual value,
it's only considered valuable because it can buy things, but if you were stranded on a
desert island, money would be totally useless. Money only has value because we believe it
has value. This is called the Tinkerbell Effect, something I learned about from Vsauce.
The Tinkerbell Effect is used to describe something that only exists because we believe
it exists. And this is the case with money. Hypothetically
speaking, if people suddenly started to believe that money had no value... it wouldn't have
any value. Of course it wasn't always this way, money
has been around for millennia, and when it was first used it was in the form of commodity
money. Things were traded that had actual value and uses, like salt, spices, horses
or weapons. As well as this precious metals such as gold as silver, which technically
don't have any intrinsic value either, but due to their rarely are almost universally
as currency. Then we have representative money. Since carrying
around everything you own can be difficult, representative money makes more sense. Basically
you give your gold to a bank and they keep it safe for you, and in return they give you
a piece of paper acknowledging that you own that gold. These pieces of paper can therefore
used as money as anyone can go and redeem the gold at any time.
But today, almost every country in the world uses fiat money. Fiat money requires faith
and trust in the government that their money will have value.
If we use a relatively young country as an example, the United States has gone through
all three monetary systems within 200 years. In 1792, when the US stopped using European
money. The Coinage Act of 1792 brought the inception of the US dollar. The US dollar
was originally in the form of commodity money in the form of gold, silver and copper coins.
The coins were actually made from real gold, silver and copper, and the value of the metal
that made the coins, were exactly equal to their face value.
The country then moved onto a mixture of commodity and representative money with the 1900 Gold
Standard Act. The government issued dollar bills which could be exchanged for gold at
any time. Gold Standard is a type of representative
money that money countries used at the time. This was an effective way to accurately calculate
the exchange rate between countries. For example, if one gram of gold costs £1
in Britain and $1.50 in America, then you can easily deduce that £1 equals $1.50.
Gold coins were discontinued and the silver was removed from the other coins, effectively
ending commodity money. In 1971, Richard Nixon officially abandoned
the Gold Standard, and the US moved onto fiat money.
So money today isn't back by gold or anything else of value for that matter.
So back to the question at hand; basic economics tells us that an increase in supply, results
in a fall in demand and therefore a fall in price. So the more money in the economy, the
lower the value of each dollar. Meaning other countries can purchase more dollars in exchange
for their currency. A second supply and demand graph shows why
this leads to a rise in prices. More money in the economy causes a shift in the demand
curve for goods and services, but since this isn't matched by in increase in economic output,
prices must rise. Look at it this way, if the government printed
a million dollars and posted it to everyone in the country, causing everyone to go out
to buy a sports cars... but there's only a finite number of sports in the country.
If we use an analogy to demonstrate this... imagine there's 4 people on a desert island,
they each have 10 pieces of fruit each. All fruits are considered equal in value.
Now imagine they discover a whole forest of apple trees. The nominal value of apples has
increased because there's more of them, but the actual value of an apple has gone down
due to an increase in supply. Therefore it now costs 10 apples for 1 banana
since demand for apples is low, but high for bananas.
Just to clarify, in this analogy, the people represent different countries, the fruits
their respective currency, and the apples tree is the printed money.
But it's not only because of economic theory that we know printing too much money is bad
idea, there's several examples throughout recent history.
The most recently example is Zimbabwe. Who, in 2008, suffered extremely high inflation
due to printing money. This was the result of some awful decisions
by the president Robert Mugabe. When the economy took a turn for the worse,
Mugabe printed more money to pay government expenditure.
This caused inflation to skyrocket, and, in mid-November 2008, Zimbabwe's inflation peaked
at... actually wait hold on a second, first I need to provide some context.
Inflation in the United States is around 2%, economists generally agree that inflation
level around 1-3% are optimum. First-world countries' inflation rates today range from
0-5%. A country is said to have enter hyperinflation when their inflation levels exceed 50%.
So... with that in mind, Zimbabwe's inflation, at its peak, reached... 6.5... sextillion
%. Or to put it another way... that number has 22 digits.
It got so bad that prices doubled every 24 hours. The government tried to solve the problem
by printed more and more money with higher and higher denominations.
They also kept knocking zeroes off the end by re-valuing the Zimbabwean dollar 3 times,
going through 4 different types of currency with 4 different ISO codes.
Before the final re-denomination, they were printing 100 trillion dollar bills.
People were literally using wheelbarrows full of cash to buy a loaf of bread.
The government even made inflation illegal at one point and people were actually arrested
for raising prices. In 2009, the Zimbabwean dollar was abandoned
and to this day they still have no national currency, their people use currencies such
as the US dollar, the Pound Sterling, and the Euro. Before the hyperinflation, the first
Zimbabwean dollar was worth about 1.25 US dollars. If that 100 trillion dollar bill
was worth that exchange rate, that single bill would be worth more money than there
is in the entire world... twice. But as ridiculous as this was, this is only
considered to be the second worst inflation in history, after Hungary in 1946.
Although Zimbabwe's inflation peaked in Mid-November of 2008, their overall highest monthly inflation
was 79.6 billion %, whereas Hungary's highest monthly inflation which took place in July
1946 was 41.9 quadrillion %. With prices doubling every 15 hours.
To put that into perspective, a country with a healthy inflation level of around 3%, prices
double every 23 years. Their currency was called the pengo, and as
inflation rose, the bil-pengo: short for billion pengo. Which is actually one trillion pengo
on the short-scale. As well as the record for the highest monthly
inflation, Hungary also holds the record for the highest denomination banknote ever issued
- the 100 million bil-pengo note. (ie - 100 million billion, or 100 quintillion). Which
is 100 quintillion pengo on the short-scale. 1 milliard bil-pengo were printed but never
issued. In 1941, the exchange rate was about 5 pengo
to 1 US dollar. In 1946, when the currency was discontinued, things had gotten so out
of hand, that if you took every single banknote in the entire county, they would have a total
value... of one tenth... of a US penny. Hungary then switched the the forint, where
1 forint equalled 400 octillion pengos. That number has 29 zeroes.
So that's why government can't just print money to pay off their debts, it does not
end well. It's also important to understand exactly
what national debt is. National debt is much more complicated than personal debt. It isn't
simply a case of 'you owe people money'. Take the country with the highest National Debt
- the United States, that currently has around 17 trillion dollars of debt, and you're probably
aware the country holds most US debt is... China. Although that is true, it's somewhat
misleading. Of the total debt, China only has about 8%. Most of the debt is actually
owned by the United States government itself, but organisations such as Social Security
or the Federal Reserve. On top of this, a further 30% is owned by
US citizens.And even though 8% of 17 trillion is still a lot, China can't just knock on
the door of the White House and demand 1.2 trillion dollars. It doesn't work like that.
Basically, the US Department of the Treasury issue treasury bonds. You can buy these bonds
and the government will pay you interest on that bond every year, then, once the bonds
have matured, they'll buy the treasury bonds back from you.
Now, if a country gets into financial trouble, it may have to default on its debt, which
basically means you won't get your money back. But the US is generally considered an extremely
risk-free investment because the US dollar is the most widely used and most trust-worthy
currency in the world. It's even written into the Constitution that the United States cannot
default on its debt. I'll leave you with this final thought and
what I think is possibly the best way to sum up why governments can't just print off unlimited
amounts of money... "If money grew on trees, it would be as valuable