moneyprintergobrrr.com

What Does “Money Printer Go Brrr” Mean?

“Money printer go brrr” is a meme mocking the idea that a central bank can solve an economic crisis by creating more money. “Brrr” is the sound of the printer running. It spread in March 2020, when the US Federal Reserve responded to the COVID-19 market crash by pumping enormous sums into the financial system.

The printer, going brrr.

Where the meme came from

In early March 2020, COVID-19 was tearing through global markets. The Federal Reserve responded at a scale nobody had seen since 2008 — including an offer of $1.5 trillion in short-term loans to keep credit markets from seizing up, followed days later by a rate cut to near zero and a fresh round of asset purchases.

The meme arrived almost immediately. It is generally credited to a March 9th, 2020 tweet from the account @femalelandlords, showing a young man in an anarcho-capitalist bowtie carefully explaining to an older wojak — labelled as the Federal Reserve — why you cannot fix a downturn by conjuring money out of nothing. The wojak is not listening. He is at the printer. The printer goes brrr.

The Fed, the crank, and the chart going back up.

It spread fast. By March 16th there was a looping GIF of a wojak spinning a money printer on r/Anarcho_Capitalism and a video version on r/Jreg. On March 17th, 2020, this website went up.

What “brrr” actually means

Nothing, technically. “Brrr” is onomatopoeia — the noise a sheet-fed printer makes when it is running flat out. That is the whole joke. One side of the image brings charts, history and monetary theory; the other side brings a sound effect. The sound effect wins.

The number of r’s is not fixed. “Brr,” “brrr,” “brrrr” and “brrrrrr” all appear in the wild, and generally the more r’s, the faster the printer is meant to be going.

How “go brrr” escaped the Fed

The format outgrew its subject almost immediately. The structure — someone makes a careful, detailed argument, and someone else responds with a noise — turned out to fit almost anything, and “haha X go brrr” became a snowclone you can drop onto any situation where brute force beats nuance.

Graphics cards go brrr. Servers go brrr. Tokens go brrr. The phrase has drifted far enough from monetary policy that plenty of people now using it have never seen the original image.

Is the Fed really printing money?

Not literally. Physical US currency is printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and that side of things is fairly boring — mostly replacing worn-out notes. What the Fed actually does is create bank reserves digitally in order to buy assets such as Treasury bonds, a process usually called quantitative easing.

No press runs, no pallets of cash. But the effect the meme is pointing at — more money chasing the same amount of stuff — is a real argument that economists have been having for a very long time. The meme just makes it in about one second.

The original site

This one. moneyprintergobrrr.com went live on March 17th, 2020, in the same week the meme broke, and it has been running ever since. Know Your Meme’s entry for the meme lists the launch as part of the timeline.

There is a slider. Drag it and the guy prints faster, the wordmark starts to rattle, and if you turn the sound on, the pitch climbs with it. That is the entire product.