Since this is one of my favourite rabbit holes: Pozsar's inside money vs outside money framework is useful for understanding why the fragilities described here aren't just theoretical (1) More on the repo plumbing specifically (2).

(1) https://philippdubach.com/posts/pozsars-bretton-woods-iii-th...

(2) https://philippdubach.com/posts/repo-might-be-even-bigger-th...

When the world's largest creditor starts rebalancing toward domestic assets, the marginal Treasury buyer becomes a marginal seller. Wrote a short piece on this in Jan: https://philippdubach.com/posts/big-in-japan/

This part is wrong. In the US scenario, the government either issues bonds (creating money) or it moves its reserves at the central bank, bringing money into circulation. Money outside of circulation effectively doesn't exist, so this effectively creates money.

Money relationships between two parts of the same entity should not be counted as money. Otherwise I can become a trillionaire by lending myself a trillion.

The deficit-surplus identity seems to only hold if the federal reserve is considered part of the government.

> The Fed’s balance sheet expands. It has more assets and more liabilities. This is not "printing money" in the colloquial sense; it is creating electronic reserve accounts that banks can use for lending or other purposes.

Except you just said money is a relationship on balance sheets. Larger balance sheet = more money. Perhaps the dispute is over the word "printing", since creating money doesn't involve a printer.

I like the section about money moving. Those of us in the cryptocurrency ecosystem see the clear parallels. When Bitcoin is used to pay for something priced in Ethereum, the bitcoins don't leave the Bitcoin network - they end up at a trader who releases the same value of ethers on the Ethereum network.

My question is, what would a "printing money" look like, hypothetically? I feel like comparing the real to the hypothetical would help me understand the difference by highlighting the contrast.