>If crisis had opened the door to a new way of thinking about money, the checks closed the door on the old: Gone was an understanding of money as a scarce, quasi-natural resource to be managed disinterestedly by apolitical experts. The question was: What was replacing it? Would MMT’s chartalist view of money as a tool of state power prevail? (The undeniable success of the pandemic cash drop seemed to be a point in its favor.) Or could the crypto-millenarians’ anarchic vision of money backed by cybermetal take the upper hand? (Cryptocurrency had a boom year, perhaps driven by the existential fear that accompanies a global pandemic.) Maybe the Marxists would finally figure out how to abolish the value form? (Don’t hold your breath.)
This is bollocks. Money will always be scarce, by design. Look at all the ppl struggling to get by even in spite of these stimulus checks, who lost their jobs or businesses due to Covid and still have not be rehired. The money that the fed is creating is not the type of money that individuals exchange with, which also explains the low inflation.
Rather, what everyone got wrong is, the experts, pundits, etc. in 2008, and now in 2020-2021 thought that all of this printing would cause inflation to surge, but CPI just refuses to budge much. This is due to many factors, such as America's growing economic dominance, which has widened since 2008 and even more so since Covid.