but they werent trying to curb deflation, they printed more money to pay debts to other countries. i imagine if we are trying to curb deflation then we'd increase the monetary supply by a calculated amount to not increase inflation too much
This concept is called quantitative easing (QE) and it doesn't always work. Though notably, it did work in '08 after the Great Recession.
Deflation cause people to be afraid of spending money because aggregate demand is much lower. It's certainly possible that QE doesn't fix consumer spending habits. Money is typically not given to people directly because that may cause separate issues. For example, some of the COVID era inflation was due to people receiving money directly from the government, which signaled to businesses that excess capital could get soaked up with price increases.
We print money and inject it into the economy all the time. But wealthy people have made sure that they're the ones who get the injections. If the money we printed was, say, given to schools and used to build roads, we would have a more just society.
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u/samrus 6h ago
but they werent trying to curb deflation, they printed more money to pay debts to other countries. i imagine if we are trying to curb deflation then we'd increase the monetary supply by a calculated amount to not increase inflation too much