“or we just PRINT UP THE MONEY?”
It’s slightly more complicated than that.
1. U.S. Secretary of Treasurer Tim Geithner prints up a big bunch of new U.S. Treasury bonds that yield some arbitrarily low interest rate because he knows Ben Bernake will buy them no matter how low their interest rate is.
2. Big Ben Bernake at the Fed trades Timmy a bunch of new ones and zeros spinning on some new hard drives at the Fed for those freshly printed super-low yield Treasury bonds because China has smartened up and won’t buy them anymore. So, the Fed doesn’t even need to actually print the money anymore. They just deposit a string of zeros and ones in the Treasury bank account.
sounds like it's just 'diluting' the fuel in the engine with nothing but water.