Banks, QE, and Money-Printing

It also erases the debt for the people who have it. And quite many people in the US have enormous amounts of household debt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_debt#United_States

Inflation (in controlled amounts) can act as a redistribution mechanism between debtors and creditors (basically a way to lessen the huge inequality gap we have today).

Money printing is always inflationary. Either it causes CPI inflation immediately or it's stored up for later. When money printing does not cause immediate CPI inflation, surplus money is stored in scarce assets which creates asset price inflation and increasing fragility which will inevitably lead to CPI inflation later.

The fact that new money is mostly backed by debt is irrelevant because those who own a lot of capital assets know that they will always be able to use their assets as collateral to take increasingly large loans in the future... Wealthy capital holders can always take new, bigger loans to pay off old smaller loans.

Those who value growth above independence must enslave themselves to banks in order to guarantee that they can keep borrowing in perpetuity. If you know that you can borrow in perpetuity to buyback your stock and make repayments on your old loans, then you can rest assured that debt is never going to be a problem for you. You can just do what the government does with treasury bonds; issue new bonds to pay off your old bonds; the government is not the only institution which can do this.

It is also a Tax on Saving, Retirements, and responsible behavior

It encourages irresponsibility and debt, and discourages people from saving, planning for their future, and over all acting in a way that is not filled with instant gratification, or extremely leveraging themselves

That provides good short term growth, but then you have recessions and depressions because at some point those balance sheets have to be balanced

Well, if you thought Congress was co-dependent on corporations to fund their campaigns before and that the US has become a country "by the corporations, for the corporations" (something Larry Lessig would probably say), then it's going to be even more true now that the Fed is illegally buying corporate bonds.

I guess that for the foreseeable future Congress will continue to rescue large corporations with taxpayer money ad nauseam - tax money to which the same corporations contribute almost nothing these days, too.

Wonderful.

Generally enjoyed this, but I thought it was kind of odd to finger wag at businesses for being “over-leveraged” because a lot of them were in distress after a global pandemic shut down the economy.

A huge exogenous shock with no potential for moral hazard seems like a pretty clear case where a sort of social insurance (i.e. a government bailout) would be the optimal solution.