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Financial crisis sends the Fed to the ATM

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The most significant lasting effect of the Lehman Brothers collapse and the subsequent financial crisis may be the ballooning of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet. The Fed pumped billions of dollars into the economy, using a process called “quantitive easing” to swell its balance sheet to $3.6 trillion today from roughly $800 billion in the summer of 2008. Rico Gagliano took a tongue-in-cheek look at where all that money comes from.