I'm annoyed by the somewhat neo-Mercantalist attitude towards money that's so easy to find in this country, and that is really the backbone of Indy's post.
Such an attitude is fundamentally driven by a belief that, more or less, a country has a set amount of money and it can only overspend by borrowing on printing, the former of which creates the same nasty obligations as private debt and the latter of which just creates inflation. There's some truth to that, but it is not at all the end of the story.
Money creation happens through more than printing money. Under normal circumstances, investment and the fractional reserve banking system have their own money creation system of sorts. If investment and fractional reserve banking did not exist and the government had, say $1,000,000,000,000 in circulation, probably $800,000,000,000 or so of that would actually be in circulation, as people would store the other $200,000,000,000 in banks that would more or less be mattresses. Unless that money was cashed in on, for all intents and purposes, it would not be in circulation. Investment and fractional reserve banking, however, put money stored in savings into circulation. They effectively create $200,000,000,000 more than would have been in existence otherwise. When the economy starts booming, this takes off even more. The issuing of debt, for many purposes, allows money to be represented twice and used twice. The borrower has the seller's money, but the seller has a guarantee to get that money (plus some) back. And often, those guarantees are traded as not much less than money to other people in the form of bonds. Stocks and various securitized assets work more or less the same way. Money multiplies itself under good circumstances. In the process, inflation is created without the government ever firing up the printing presses, but so it growth.
In 2008, trillions of dollars of this paper wealth vanished. Much of it was based on completely absurd securitized tranches of mortgages and other assets. Sure, to an observer in hindsight, it may have been a bad idea for banks to have issued ARMs for $600,000 homes to people making $40,000 per year (probably an exaggeration, but it was pretty bad). But that's not what mattered. What mattered is that investors bought tranches and tranches of these mortgages. And as long as other investors thought they were worthwhile and the borrowers paid their minimum payments under their temporarily low interest rates and optimism for future salaries, the cycle maintained itself. In a way, a Ponzi scheme organically developed, and the creation of de facto money rested on its shoulders. When that cycle crashed (animal spirits? high oil prices? investors realizing that this may not be a good idea? all of the above and then some?), de facto money vanished.
Under the classical microeconomic approach to thinking, the apt response to this would have been instant broad-based deflation to the point where real income and prices all adjusted to be just the same and everyone went on their merry way. Well, also according to the classical micro model, none of what I just described should have happened, because investors should have been rational and should have known what was coming their way. It may be argued that government protection helped to fuel the fire, because it minimized investor losses and they knew that it would. This is a fair argument. However, it's silly to think that investors didn't suffer at all from this crash; the government just cushioned the loss. But what the classical micro modal predicted would happen is not at all what happened. Recession happened. De facto money went out of circulation. Investors lost confidence and put their money into safe assets (cash itself, US treasury bonds, safe corporate bonds, and whatnot), the layoffs began, investors lost more confidence, et cetera.
All of this happened with no change to the base money supply, but assets that were treated as de facto money and that freed up cash to circulate disappeared. And from this, another thing that shouldn't happen according to classical microeconomics happened: the economy began producing at less than its full capacity to produce. An answer I hear a lot in defense of classical micro models is that unemployment insurance and other safety net government programs disincentive employment... in other words, that this unemployment is more or less voluntary. Of course, this ignores the reality that a life on unemployment insurance and the rest of the safety net isn't exactly glamorous compared with life with the help of a good job. But this issue gets to the root of our economic problem: the United States is not producing as much as it could. Why? Largely because there isn't the demand, also known as consumer confidence, for corporations to justify investments and hiring. We may talk about regulations being an issue. And it is true that lower regulations will lead to more hiring, although lower regulations also present future problems (that 7.5% growth rate from 1984 was probably a bad thing), such as the sort of bubble that caused all of these issues in the first place. What really is needed to justify hiring is demand, but demand comes from hiring... so there's a nasty vicious cycle. To clear this up requires the insertion of new money into circulation, through debt and through printing. Printing creates inflation, yes, but in the case of the first two rounds of quantitative easing, such inflation probably just prevented deflation (which would have been really, really nasty for borrowers). What it creates, more importantly, is demand. If that demand could not be met by additional supply, at the point where the economy is producing at its structural capacity, then all that would happen is pure inflation. And even before that point, there's probably a point where the inflation consequence would be worse than the growth reward. But printing money has its place, in order to get an economy to create more. What is important is not the lump sum of money that a country has, but how much it produces. When an economy is not producing at its structural potential is when printing money is really a problem. That is where examples of disastrous hyperinflation come from... the Zimbabwes and the Wiemar Republics of the world. Any level of growth inherently creates inflation, and inflation is not always the end of the world. When de facto money evaporates, printing real money does not just create pure inflation. Putting it in the hands of consumers and investors can stop an economy's retreat away from full production. Of course, classical micro says that an economy should always be at full production, because that's what happens when people act in their own self-interest. That ignores the fact that it is only wise to spend money on employment and whatnot if everyone else is... i.e., if the economy is booming. In a recession, the economy is stuck in an equilibrium of sorts where nobody spends because nobody spends, but if every spent then things would be all fine and dandy. Getting out of that requires both replacing toxic assets with less toxic assets and spurring demand. Quantitative easing and TARP helped do the former. The latter requires spurring demand, through stimulus programs. There is no direct way to do that with printing money in America, legally, so there comes fiscal stimulus, through a variety of programs often financed through debt. Federal debt has its own money-creation effects, though. The liquidity of US treasury bonds is considered incredibly high (look at how low their yields are right now), and they are also traded as de facto money... federal debt in the United States isn't all that different from firing up the printing presses. But this response has to hit both the supply side and the demand side, or it's useless.
Sorry for the length of this... I guess, overall, my point is just that money creation through its variety of methods is not just tantamount to pure inflation. What matters to an economy is how much it produces, and that can often be spurred through money creation in the face of falling corporate liquidity and falling consumer demand. Inflation happens when demand increases because people have more money, in whatever form. But if an economy can produce more and there is demand for more, companies faced with more healthy-looking demand curves will, given the capital and potential resources (such as a bunch of laid off people to potentially hire), also produce more rather than just purely raise prices.
