Ask an Economist
It is about currency and how our money is no longer backed by "gold." Money (i.e. coins and bills) in essence is the same as chips at a casino. At the end of the day, if I choose, I could cash in my chips and get something of value for them. MONEY.
Back in the day, before Jimmy Carter, it was the same way, that, at any time, I could cash in my MONEY for GOLD. (which although has no intrinsic value, is determined to HAVE value.)
So, here is my question.....and I hope I explain it well. A lot of people out there are asking "why can't we just print more money and solve the poverty problem?" Terms like "inflation" and the "devaluing of the dollar" are the usual buzz answers to that question. Also, people give the example that if the government were to print more money and just give everyone $50,000, then everyone would go out and buy things, thus making THINGS more in short supply, thus driving up the price of things. (simple supply/demand economics) But this is where I'm curious. With TRUE unemployment probably somewhere around 15% in this country, if DEMAND rose, then companies would WANT to hire more people and build more processing plants to keep up with demand and raise their profits. So, the influx of cash (printed money) would seem to solve the unemployment problem.
So, here is where I'm confused.....if I apply the same idea of "printing more money and handing it out to the public" to my casino example, then that would be like the casino giving everyone at the poker table an extra $100 in chips to play with. But here's the catch. I understand the PROBLEM with doing that at the casino, because if you give people all these extra chips, then at the end of the night, when people CASH OUT, there will not be enough money in the vault to pay for all the chips. Hence the problem.
But how does that relate to American economics since there is no "cashing out" procedure. If the government gave everyone a bunch more money, there is no "checks and balances" since no one, at the end of the day, goes to the cashier station and exchanges their "chips" (money in this case) for something of value.
Exchanging your chips at the end of the day for MONEY back (which has value in our eyes) makes sense, hence why you can't give out more chips than the money you have in the vault. But it seems the American dollar is not a paper representation of the "money in the vault" no one goes to cash in their money in America.
So I don't understand how currency works and why we can't just print more money since it really isn't representative of anything of value.
Please explain, as I cant find a good answer anywhere online.
(I hope this question wasn't convoluted.)
Thank you so much for your time
Let me try to remove some of the confusion. Imagine the only good in the economy is corn and corn costs $1 a pound, and imagine you and all others earn $100 a month. Each month you buy 100 lbs of corn exchanging $1 for 1 lb of corn; so the real...
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So if we're looking into the future and we predict that the BRL will have an inflation rate of 7% per year, and the USD will have inflation of 3% per year, obviously the cost to live in Brazil will grow much faster than in the US. If that's true, over a period of 30-40 years, in theory, should the exchange rate become more favorable to the USD as the value of the BRL is eroded due to inflation? If so, is there a way I can replicate that effect in my retirement planning? Thank you for hearing my question. Please reach out to my email address if any clarification is needed.
First, a disclaimer. Whatever is written below is not actual investment advice; it is general economics discussion, a dinner table conversation, no more.
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