Did the Fed just shrink the dollar?

[Skink]

Honey I shrunk the currency.

[ixion]

1. yes... this is the downside of printing your own money

the more you print, the less it's worth.

[marketcrazy1]

2. not yet but they will

oops!!

[zbdent]

3. I WAS SWIMMING!

THE WATER WAS COLD!

[dkf]

4. And made oil more expensive.

I hope people didn't buy SUVs thinking gas would be cheap forever.

[phantom power]

5. One way or another, the economy is going to lose value...

They can either not print money, in which case the economy will become worth fewer dollars, or they can print money, in which case it will still be worth as many dollars, but those dollars will be worth less. Or some linear combination of the two.

As long as they don't fuck it up and set off an episode of hyper-inflation, the "print money" version may be a reasonable way to go.

[metapunditedgy]

6. Look at it this way: the toxic assets Wall Street holds are *so* toxic

that the entire currency has to be wrecked in order to devalue those assets so they're not worth as much.

I'm sure there's some steps in between point A and point B, but it's a great "bottom line" illustration of just another way everyone is suffering to bail out the crooks.

[femrap]

7. Funny...

They'll do anything not to have deflation....Can't have consumer prices going down, can we?

They are eliminating the Middle Class entirely. We will be the Number 1 3rd World Country.

So we can still holler....'we're number 1. we're number 1.' lol.

[FlyingTiger]

8. Yes. Yes They Did. And There's Nothing We Can Do About It.

Nothing, that is, until we get rid of the Fed. I don't know what the solution really is - going back to the gold standard, involving more international currency in the domestic economy, maybe some other crazy idea that a monetary genius comes up with - but an unsupervised, unelected bank that has total control over our currency and can leverage it a billion to one is proving to be a very bad thing.