[Jim W N]

No, this guy is not correct. He’s saying money creates wealth. But money is only the MEASURE of wealth. He’s saying we can change the weights and measures on a scale to say whatever we want it to say.

[Publius]

The global US dollar pool is the only pool of currency deep enough to handle $4 trillion of foreign exchange per day in the FOREX markets. There is an insatiable demand for US dollars, both as physical cash and as T-bills represented by bits and bytes. Those T-bills are the collateral of the world banking system.

How do you keep up with that demand? You spend more than you take in. If you’re a Democrat you expand entitlements. If you’re a Republican you fight endless wars.

If we attempted to even reduce those annual deficits – forget balancing the budget or paying down the debt – it would collapse the world banking system.

It would be like the Panic of 2008, where the real estate bubble collapsed, and Goldman Sachs exacerbated the problem by shorting its own mortgage-backed securities. A black hole opened up in the real estate pits accompanied by a global margin call. Banks feared they could not open due to a shortage of dollars to grease the world’s financial machinery. We had to create vast trillions of dollars (TARP) to bail out the banking system and keep the machinery greased.

As long as the US dollar is the world’s reserve currency, we can’t go bankrupt because we create the reality of that currency. If some other currency takes on that status, or the world returns to some kind of hard money standard (gold), then the game is over, and we have to go back to the way things were before 1933.