We've been paying for it through price inflation, and now we're paying for it through a deflating bubble economy as the Fed tries to undo its malfeasance.

In the wake of the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve pushed interest rates to zero and held them there for years. It also ran three rounds of quantitative easing, pumping trillions of dollars of freshly printed money into the economy. The Fed tried to "normalize" monetary policy by raising rates and shrinking its balance sheet in 2018, but it ended up aborting that attempt when the bubbles blown up by a decade of easy money started leaking air.

The pandemic gave the Fed cover to double cut rates again and double down on QE. In less than two years, the central bank expanded its balance sheet by nearly $5 trillion and flooded the economy with more money created out of thin air.

The bubbles blown up after 2008 got even bigger.

Now the Fed is trying to fight the inevitable price inflation.

WolfStreet perfectly summed up what has happened over the last 15 years.

"The era of money-printing and interest-rate repression in the United States, which started in 2008, gave rise to all kinds of stuff, and the easy money kept going and kept going, and all this money needed to find a place to go, and then money-printing went hog-wild in 2020 and 2021. And the stuff it gave rise to just got bigger and bigger, and crazier and crazier. And much of this stuff is now in the process of coming apart, I mean falling apart, or getting taken apart in a controlled manner, and some stuff has already imploded in a messy way."