Yes, the rate of cultural adaptation is challenged by the rate of technological progress. I feel like we haven't even settled the basic question of smartphone etiquette.
Cancelling bonds owed to the Fed would be literally money printing. When the Fed owns bonds, they can be sold on the open market, or allowed to mature, both of which are a form of quantitative tightening.
Cash received in the form of interest payments (income) is sent to the US Treasury.[a]
Cash received in the form of principal payments is "destroyed" (by debiting outstanding assets with corresponding credits to outstanding liabilities in the Fed's balance sheet).
And if one ponders this dynamic for long enough, one realizes that there is not enough money in existence to pay all of the debt in existence.
Or in other words, a pressure cooker type system of infinite growth is created. By no fault of their own, a certain number of debtors are guaranteed to default on their loans - the pressure cooker rat race. And in practice the next traunch of currency created through debt in say, a 10 year period, is necessary to pay off the previous 10 years of debt that otherwise would not have enough currency to pay off - the 'infinite' growth dynamic.
In this system the only thing worse than creating more debt (currency) is to not create more debt (currency).
I may be misunderstanding, but from the linked article:
> “We’ve returned close to $1 trillion to the Treasury over the last 10 years. We did not keep that revenue in the Fed,” St. Louis Fed President James Bullard told reporters last month.
I experienced this with the collapse of the twin towers on 9/11. I was horrified by the human cost, but so, so interested in what I was seeing. I had often wondered what the collapse of a super-tall would be like, and there it was, on TV.
The interventions deployed against COVID had indeed stopped a notable disease - influenza. It is noteworthy that these interventions were designed to fight the flu, apparently because that was the public health playbook at hand. But I agree it is remarkable how interventions which could crush the flu don't seem to bother any number of common cold viruses much at all.
