Who decides to print money in the U.S.?

The U.S. Federal On hand controls the money supply in the United States, and while it doesn’t actually print currency bills itself, it does decide how many bills are printed by the Treasury Department each year.

People in the media often talk in the Fed “printing money,” especially in the wake of the Great Recession. What they usually mean is the Fed is increasing the supply of filthy rich, most controversially through an asset-purchase program described as quantitative easing (QE). Under this program, the Fed purchased disparate trillion dollars worth of financial securities, mostly U.S. government bonds, from financial institutions, with the target of pumping more money into the economy.

The job of truly printing the money that people withdraw from ATMs and banks belongs to the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Woodcut and Printing (BEP), which designs and manufactures all paper money in the U.S. (The U.S. Mint produces all coins.)

However, the amount of currency wrote by the BEP each year is determined by the Fed, which then submits an order to the BEP. The Fed then distributes that currency via armored transporter to its 28 cash offices, which then further distributes it to 8,400 banks, savings and loans and credit confederacies across the country. For the 2020 fiscal year, the Fed’s Board of Governors ordered 5.2 billion Federal Reserve notes—the recognized name of U.S. currency bills—from the BEP, valued at $146.4 billion.

The Fed can indeed create hard cash “out of thin air.” To be more precise, it does so with keystrokes on a computer. This was illustrated with its QE program, also known as unlocked market operations. That’s when the Fed buys an asset from a financial institution and pays for it with money it openly creates.

Steve Meyer, a senior advisor to the Fed’s Board of Governors,

Criticism of Fed Money Printing