The real answer is that the meaning of this phrase "printing money" is unbelievably more complicated in the modern world than people understand.
There really is not a thing called "a dollar". It's better to think of the dollar is a complicated engineered system. "Printing money" frequently means tweaking some subsystem of that system to move liquidity to specific places. That may sound like semantics but those types of money can only be used in specific ways and aren't convertible into each other.
One thing Jeff Snider talks about (who is someone I find to have interesting thoughts on this topic but isn't beginner friendly, and also puts out some low quality content) is that people are focused on the quantitative expansion of money but that over the last 30 years, the potentially more interesting story is the qualitative expansion of money, IE we have invented a huge amount of subtly different new types of "money" all of which have different effects on the system and none of which are easily understandable by the average person. He argues that the central banks no longer really understand this system either, that large banks probably have the best current understanding but that really no one party fully understands it, kind of like how no single person understands every detail of a modern smartphone.
Some of the basic categories here are
1) Understanding the differences between base money and non base money
2) various repo market products and other types of "interbank liabilities"
2a) the various Fed facilities which moderate liquidity in these markets
3) All the other Fed Facillities, especially things like Foreign Central Bank liquidity swaps which is really another totally different category of money
4) Offshore dollar markets (eurodollar markets) and their dollar repo markets
5) And then QE (which simply means buying the long end of the bond market as opposed to short end which was traditionally just called Open market operations, but also happens in bigger volumes than OMO)
As someone else mentioned, Joseph Wang's book could be a good starting point
There really is not a thing called "a dollar". It's better to think of the dollar is a complicated engineered system. "Printing money" frequently means tweaking some subsystem of that system to move liquidity to specific places. That may sound like semantics but those types of money can only be used in specific ways and aren't convertible into each other.
One thing Jeff Snider talks about (who is someone I find to have interesting thoughts on this topic but isn't beginner friendly, and also puts out some low quality content) is that people are focused on the quantitative expansion of money but that over the last 30 years, the potentially more interesting story is the qualitative expansion of money, IE we have invented a huge amount of subtly different new types of "money" all of which have different effects on the system and none of which are easily understandable by the average person. He argues that the central banks no longer really understand this system either, that large banks probably have the best current understanding but that really no one party fully understands it, kind of like how no single person understands every detail of a modern smartphone.
Some of the basic categories here are
1) Understanding the differences between base money and non base money
2) various repo market products and other types of "interbank liabilities"
3) All the other Fed Facillities, especially things like Foreign Central Bank liquidity swaps which is really another totally different category of moneyhttps://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/desk-operations/central-b...
4) Offshore dollar markets (eurodollar markets) and their dollar repo markets
5) And then QE (which simply means buying the long end of the bond market as opposed to short end which was traditionally just called Open market operations, but also happens in bigger volumes than OMO)
As someone else mentioned, Joseph Wang's book could be a good starting point
Here is a really interesting talk on some of these topics: https://youtu.be/itTpI_-OcPc?t=962