The amounts involved in the Fed’s quantitative easing have been staggering. Back in 2008, the Fed’s balance sheet had assets of $820 billion. They reached $4.5 trillion — yes, trillion — in 2015 and dropped only as low as $3.76 trillion in the summer of 2019. With the coronavirus financial crisis, they have ballooned again, to $8.9 trillion, and may swell a bit more before the spigot shuts. Assets held by the Fed are already more than 10 times their size in 2008, and bigger, as a proportion of gross domestic product, than at any time since World War II.The Fed’s monetary stimulus accompanied a total of roughly $5 trillion in pandemic fiscal relief by the federal government. Governments and central banks around the world engaged in emergency relief spending, too. The global fiscal and monetary stimulus total amounts to $25 trillion, according to Chris Dillon, a global inve …
