Climate, meet weather.

> You linked to a chart showing a 10% decrease in the monetary base from peak, even including the run-up since February.

You should compare today's figures with 2010 figures, not the ones from a year ago.

> should compare today's figures with 2010 figures, not the ones from a year ago

Nobody will argue we didn’t print money in the last decade. Per unit of GDP, we have 22% more money than we had ten years ago [1].

Implying recent bank failures are causing that to increase is false, and in some ways backwards.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=lJS

The amount of $ measured in terms of US GDP (also in $). That way of comparing things is fraught with issues

> amount of $ measured in terms of US GDP (also in $)

It’s convention because it cancels out a lot of noise. (Both nominal.) And there are practical reasons for a larger economy needing more money to work than a smaller one. But if you prefer, it can be calculated in various ways, all of which tell a similar story: we’ve been in a different regime for the last 1 to 3 years in which there is less money, and a regime before that since 2008 when there was a lot more money.

Comparing the monetary base to average temperatures makes no sense. We expect the latter to be stable long term (human-wise). We want the former to track GDP, more or less [1]. In that metric, too, the anomalous period was 2008 - 2020, with a phase change towards less money per unit of GDP since.

There are many reasonable issues with this purchase and sale. But “money printer go brr” isn’t a particularly insightful nor relevant one.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=lJS

"We want" ... not sure if a vote would really turn out that way.

I think for most people having something like the gold standard seems much more plausible.

Having a flexible supply of the settlement currency is a pretty new experiment. Not even 100 years old. And it has ended in desasters around the world multiple times already.

> not sure if a vote would really turn out that way

We don’t vote on individual drug approvals, either.

Some people have a broad vendetta against the Fed and fiat currency. That is fine. But shoehorning it into every discussion, even when it isn’t relevant, doesn’t advance anything. This is a bank failure being resolved with public-private participation within the FDIC’s framework with support from the OCC. There are smart things one can say about the FHLBs, TBTF and liquidity ratios. (You pointed out centralisation. That’s a smart thing to discuss!) There isn’t much relevance to the Fed and monetary base, however, unless we’re speculating on the next rate rise.

The man in the street might find it plausible that asbestos and cigarettes are safe and that global warming isn't real. "Plausible" is not the same as "true", a problem which the AI people are grappling with.

Not having a flexible currency supply causes separate problems as people run out of specie. Furthermore the counterfactuals for 2008 and 2020 look .. bad.

> And it has ended in desasters around the world multiple times already.

Well the global economy and most national ones were in a permanent boom and bust cycle between at least the mid to late 18th century and the Great Depression.

The gold standard was never stable, just look at:

https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/1800?amount=1#:~:t....

Just instead of steadily (well prior to 2020 anyway) going up all the time like now the worth of currencies was swinging up and down in a wildly volatile and unpredictable manner every few years..