It's a natural question to ask, if it's your first time taking the course (I never asked it, but I've taken a couple of economics classes and lots of people ask it).

by Anonymous 13 years ago

I promise I'm not a ditz, but I actually don't understand. Would you mind explaining? Pretty please? :)

by Anonymous 13 years ago

It leads to inflation and causes more problems than it solves. Germany printed large amounts of money after WWI in order to pay back their "debt" (damages done by the war) to the Big Five. In led to the inflation of virtually everything (we're talking bread costing thousands of dollar) and hence, the entire country fell into a depression. Lucky for them, the rest of the world followed shortly (for other reasons.) But yes, money is relative. Printing more money doesn't make things more affordable. It just adds the amount of zero's to the price.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Okay, thank you so much!

by Anonymous 13 years ago

@1020141 (musiclover): Yup Etherial summed it up pretty good, more money = higher prices. In Germany, the people burned the money instead of fire wood, because the money was worthless. And it went into a state of hyper inflation, where one U.S. dollar would be worth a million billion gagizillion macknoellion dollars.... Oh the reason the rest of the world followed was because, Germany was paying France and Britain, France and Britain were paying U.S. and U.S. was loaning Germany. When the U.S. fell into depression (Black Tuesday and the stock market crashed) U.S. could no longer loan Germany and Germany could no longer pay G.B. or Fr and G.B. nor Fr could pay U.S. In case you didn't know, now you do and if you did, then it's been reinforced?

by Anonymous 13 years ago

also, money has to be backed up by gold

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Umm, I'm almost positive there isn't enough gold to back up the amount of money the U.S. owes.... I'm not up to date on this, but I'm pretty sure the Gold Standard ended with Nixon?

by Anonymous 13 years ago

idk my teacher two years ago said we did sorry if thats inaccurate

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Really? Well, I'd take your teachers word over mine... SIKE! Your teacher's an IDIOT!!! No I'm kidding, but seriously I'm no econ major, I don't know what I'm talking about, you should find out! Do a lil private investigation!

by Anonymous 13 years ago

It really annoys me because it's the most stupid question.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

and then the 5 dorks yell "BECAUSE OF INFLATION! DUH"

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Um, but it would solve everything. /troll

by Anonymous 13 years ago

aww sadd....for the longest that was mee....but s'okay because i've learned since then, and no longer ask that question B) lol ...but still, there's that other kid that sits behind... -_-

by Anonymous 13 years ago

To be fair, we all used to think that.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

I thought that too, when I was younger. I don't know a lot about economics, but at least I know about inflation.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

That's basically what they did with the quantitative easing for this recession. Unfortunately, it didn't actually solve anything.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

If printing more $ causes inflation, why dont they add to whatever makes the money worth its price? like in america, money is worth its price because of the gold in this one place (i forget where). so why dont you add to the gold, and print more money?

by Anonymous 13 years ago

add gold? we can't add gold we don't have.. We can't just decide how much we're worth.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

can't we mine it? or go to war with another country? I'm only joking XD i see your point

by Anonymous 13 years ago

): i was really suprised every one was going on about inflation and it took a while for anyone to say money needs to be backed up by gold

by Anonymous 13 years ago