The Imperiali$m of Relief
American imperialism manifests in a lot of ways. But in this pandemic crisis, one way that’s getting my attention is in terms of protection against inflation.
Right now the US Fed is spending like never before. They just pulled a $6 trillion relief package out of nowhere to deal with the production crisis.
You’d think that’d come with some kind of consequence. Like, surely the Fed will somehow have to be responsible for this $6 trillion. We’d have to owe something or someone, somehow, some way.
But actually, maybe not. At least not in any obvious or immediate sense.
A government that guarantees its own currency can print any amount of it and put it in circulation. But governments don’t do that because, if you print a ton of money, it starts to lose its meaning like saying a word over and over again until it’s just a sound unmoored from its concept.
Financially speaking, when you print money and circulate it willy nilly you get currency inflation: at a certain point, barrels of your currency won’t buy a loaf of bread.
But not the US. The United States of America doesn’t have to worry about the dollar inflating because our currency is a currency of currencies.
In 1971, the dollar replaced gold as the standard against which all other currencies are measured.
So there’s an imperialism of relief, in this sense, because the dollar remains impervious to the inflation that any other currency would experience if its government just decided to print $6 trillion of it.