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Disinfection after work: Currently everyday life on the New York Stock Exchange
On March 26 of this year, US Federal Reserve (Fed) chief Jerome Powell made an extraordinary statement in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.
"We will continue to run out of ammunition," he told the Americans, signaling that the central bank was ready to take all necessary measures to contain the worsening economic crisis.
Just three months later, the Fed had injected nearly $ 3 trillion in liquidity into the US economy.
And the USA was not the only state that tackled the corona-related economic slump with fresh money: The total assets of the central banks of the ten largest industrial nations (G 10) increased by around six trillion US dollars in the same period.
Even in the 2008/09 financial crisis, such daring measures by the world's richest central banks became a "new normal".
Now, during the coronavirus pandemic, they have reached unprecedented proportions.
Some, right and left alike, rail against such radical money interventionism.
It is also noticeable that many prominent economists and economic historians have come together to support the bold measures taken by the central banks.
Many of them consider "quantitative easing" (QE, in German: "quantitative easing") through the supply of money as a basic condition in order to be able to react to any kind of economic crisis.
Also on one as different from the previous ones as the virus crisis.
How could economists be so confident that central banks were doing the right thing, at a time when medical experts still disagreed on whether mouth and nose protection should be compulsory or a vaccine would provide permanent immunity?
Their remarkable certainty provides an opportunity to explore how past economic crises have affected our understanding of current crises.
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